Revitalizing Historic Plazas for Integrated Urban Conservation

Historic plazas play a major role in improving or creating place identity, place memory, and belonging of heritage areas. They maintain elements of tangible and intangible heritage, such as accommodating social networks, traditions, lifestyles, traditional crafts, festivals, or rituals. Above all, they manifest a unique sense of place, and collective memory of cities to local communities, contributing to the historical character of heritage areas. The paper claims that the revitalization of historic plazas intends to reconcile conserving their historical urban landscape (HUL) to meet the changing requirements of local communities. It argues that revitalizing historical plazas is an innovative approach that helps to overcome the current urban conservation gaps in many heritage areas. Likewise, it strengthens the perceptions of the built heritage and historic buildings, while retaining their historic character and increasing their social vitality and performance. Furthermore, the distinctiveness of historic plazas can uncover the hidden forms and fabrics in historic areas and inspire their future development. This review paper aims to describe how historical public spaces as places of social interactions and traditional cultural activities are significant in conserving historic living areas. It aims to investigate a variety of approaches to the conservation of historical buildings/sites through the revitalization of historic plazas as multidimensional spaces in selected case studies. The methodology used is to study the usage of current patterns of selected historic public places; to analyze various strategies implemented to revitalize those patterns. The main objective is to contribute in formulating a practical approach to enhance the liveliness and the quality of life of historic plazas; to fit the residents’ culture as an integral part of urban conservation.