With increased urbanization and rapid urban development, cities worldwide have moved from a qualitative urbanism - as a vehicle of social, economic and environmental development - to a quantitative urbanism of mushrooming urbanization, devouring cultural, environmental and ecological resources. In the wake of globalism forces, urbanization has also shifted the paradigm of the social and cultural representation of cities. Since the advent of seemingly modernist urbanism at the beginning of the twentieth century, the contemporary urban form in most cities of the world has pursued a global and cosmopolitan image. This new image of tabula rasa and abstraction has had negative consequences on social and cultural sustainability.

‘Sustainable’, ‘resilient’ and ‘green’ have become intertwined as key components for the future of the city, together with the need for culture to support their performance. Exponential urban growth since the Industrial Revolution has brought about new challenges. These challenges have only increased since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, when the preservation and enhancement of the human environment was first put on the world agenda.

The common wealth of every city is its accessible public spaces, of varying sizes and types. Together, the combined system of public spaces offers economic, environmental and social benefits to city dwellers as cultural assets of their city for able-bodied, disabled, young, old, men, women and children. Discrimination is the opposite of inclusion and public spaces can welcome everyone. Inherited from prior generations, cities take their form from the lands conserved and designed as parks, squares, streets, boulevards, pavements, trails and aquatic environments and accessible margins of streams, rivers, lakes, canals, oceans and more. In some fortunate cities, urban areas are adjacent to or near larger conservation areas, reserves and national parks that serve as urban cultural assets for the populace and their visitors.

Urban heritage, including its tangible and intangible elements, is a key social, cultural and economic asset for cities. Inexorably place-based, it constitutes a dynamic layering of heritage values, created, interpreted and shaped by successive generations over time. The tangible (or material) heritage of cities - objects, monuments, industrial areas, natural landscapes, infrastructures, and historic centres and neighbourhoods – enriches the culture of communities as markers of history and for creating and transferring a sense of place to new generations. Tangible heritage also provides physical support for a wide range of social activities ranging from celebrations, political demonstrations, exchange of ideas, production and trade of cultural products, and recreation, which are essential for the quality of life of urban populations. The scope of urban heritage, however, is not limited to physical environment. It also includes intangible heritage, or 'living heritage’ - the oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and knowledge transmitted from one generation to the next. This broadened definition of heritage has been reflected in more integrated approaches to the conservation and rehabilitation of urban heritage; one that embodies a more holistic vision that considers heritage within its wider social and geographical context.