To mark World Cities Day 2025 and its theme “People-Centred Smart Cities,” the UNESCO World Heritage Cities Programme is releasing a new set of case studies on the UNESCO Urban Heritage Atlas.

      A resource for education, capacity-building, and participation

An atlas

The Urban Heritage Atlas is an atlas and an archive that documents and explains, visually, narratively, and with analytical maps, the diversity and uniqueness of the world's historic cities and settlements. As such, it serves as a repository of city-building practices and new developments over time, as well as across the diverse regions of the world. This also includes vernacular architecture and traditional building techniques. While many collections and publications on World Heritage cities have been produced through the years, the diverse attributes and dimensions of World Heritage properties in urban contexts, and urban heritage in general, remain inadequately understood and threatened by a rapidly urbanising world. Urban heritage is often imagined as a collection of monuments and managed in an isolated way disconnected from holistic urban dynamics. This resource aims to fill this gap.

A technical aid

The Urban Heritage Atlas is technical aid for the implementation of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL Recommendation), an instrument that provides a framework and approach for integrating heritage conservation with urban development plans and processes. As it makes the different layers of heritage visible, it supports better management of the historic urban area, ensuring that new projects and interventions are compatible with its heritage values. The HUL Approach is a way of understanding urban heritage as part of a landscape or system composed of different elements and layers. It is not a category of cultural landscape nor a type of site. The Urban Heritage Atlas will be supported by the Managing Urban Heritage (currently under preparation), a resource manual, and a guide for the implementation of the HUL Recommendation.

A cultural mapping platform

The Urban Heritage Atlas is also a cultural mapping platform that supports the identification and documentation of the distinctive character of the Historic Urban Landscape that has unique elements and features. For local (and national) authorities, this platform helps recognise what should be protected in a historic city or settlement and thus helps with better management of historic urban areas. It supports mapping the distinctive character of the Historic Urban Landscape that expresses the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of the World Heritage property at different scales. Cultural mapping is a methodology that makes visible the spatial relationships and built forms, cultural resources and practices, and national features that make historic cities and settlements distinctive and meaningful. It supports those cities and settlements that are a part of or have properties inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, as well as all others not yet inscribed on the World Heritage List, including those on the national Tentative Lists (sites that may be eventually considered for nomination to the World Heritage List).

A learning resource