Abstract:
Sustainability is a compound matter, which have three aspects: the socio - cultural factors, the environmental and the economic sustainability. These aspects are often neglected, especially when referring to urban development of Egyptian cities that embrace involved built cultural heritage within their urban fabric. Cultural heritage is mainly regarded as archaeological heritage. Although Since few years, the cultural heritage management has started to move towards new trend that link between conservation and sustainable development.
Strategic plans have been prepared for all Egyptian cities, including cities of historical value. Historical cities have no special tool to ensure that the built heritage secure sustainable development, due to the deficiency of the management tools, urban development and built cultural heritage have often been cited as incompatible forces in urban management. For this reason, this paper intends to introduce a modified tool for the strategic planning of Egyptian historic cities. This tool helps to: reflect conservation and sustainable development relationship; perceive the built heritage as no longer hindrance to modernization and economic growth; and consider historical values as power for development. Moreover, the positive effect of cultural heritage in sustainable development is strongly recommended to be considered as the main achievement during the phase of planning.
The overarching questions were as following: do strategic planning goals and criteria support the concretization of cultural values? What are the experiences in cultural heritage management Plans? How can built cultural heritage be linked with urban and environmental sustainable development? And what are the potential cooperative interactions between heritage preservation and sustainable development?