IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Urban urgencies are escalating. Across compact, historically-layered cities, the convergence of climate change, socioeconomic stress, and political instability is outpacing the diagnostic tools available to those responsible for managing them. Urban systems are inherently non-linear, the relationship between residents, infrastructure, and environment resists simple modelling, making anticipatory policy not merely difficult but routinely absent. The communities who bear the greatest cost of this diagnostic failure are those living within heritage districts, where the built fabric is simultaneously the most vulnerable and the most irreplaceable. Community value is evident in the architecture that weaves the district. This paper argues that integrated urban diagnostics, combining spatial, environmental, psychosocial, and community-value indicators, alongside building properties, are essential to unlocking informed, equitable, and anticipatory responses to urban urgencies. The more interconnected the diagnostic framework, the more legible the city becomes to those tasked with protecting it. Focusing on two coastal living-heritage districts, Portsmouth (UK) and Alexandria (Egypt), the paper presents a cross-cultural comparative framework bridging Global North and South conditions. Living coastal-heritage zones represent a significant yet critically underserved proportion of the urban fabric in both cities, demanding urgent and targeted policy innovation. Drawing on the COHERE research programme, the paper demonstrates how spatially-integrated diagnostics reframe heritage adaptation as an equity challenge, placing living communities, not merely built fabric, at the centre of resilience planning.
The outcomes will benefit planners, policy makers, conservation teams, heritage practitioners including Historic England and Egyptian heritage authorities, urban development bodies, and the living communities whose identity, health, and belonging depend on the spaces they inhabit.