Eidetic Mapping An Exploration for Sustainability and Resilience of Historic Urban Landscapes

The Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) recommendations adopted by UNESCO in 2011 serve as an instrument to respond to challenges to cultural heritage in urban environments faced by rapid urbanization, climate change, and urban conflict. It outlines the knowledge and planning tool emphasizing on the documentation and mapping of landscape characteristics to facilitate decision-making processes within a framework of sustainable development. Mapping typically precedes planning and design processes and methods of visually representing risks and vulnerabilities of the territory and formulating them in light of sustainable development of the area, can offer different perspectives to stakeholders and institutions albeit is practiced in limited capacities and innovation. The article explores eidetic mapping as a tool for visually representing diachronicity and socio-spatial configurations HULs to aid the decision-making process. The case study of the ancient port town of Jaffa, Israel serves as a testing ground for the proposed method, documenting the diachronous evolution, spatial and socio-economic attributes, and testing its relevance for a new sustainable urban design approach to complex historic urban environments. As this research is based on historical information, the article is categorized as qualitative research with a descriptive-analytic approach while the combination with digital tools takes a heuristic approach. The paper will discuss how the research processed data from primary sources of old maps, photographs, and other information and explorations through visualizations. The above experiment using archival records and integrating them with GIS tools as an integral part of the HUL approach, reveals the potential of what can be termed as eidetic mapping method in the process of sustainable and resilient urban design and planning for historic urban environments. The potential of this hybrid form of geo-spatial analysis of a historic urban landscape, documenting and reconstructing its palimpsest of information, of spatial configurations and their diachronic social and cultural evolution is presented.