The preservation of the built environment constitutes an important objective of cultural heritage law. Historic urban areas are among the most important expressions of our common cultural heritage, reflecting the broad diversity of human experience and the development of key cultural values and practices across time and space. They also present many unique challenges to cultural heritage preservation. Asian cities in particular are currently at the centre of a process of rapid urbanization that is likely to have serious and irreversible consequences for the tangible features of the urban environment and for the intangible practices and traditions of the communities that live there.

The workshop engages with emerging questions concerning the role of cultural heritage law in preserving heritage of outstanding universal value in some of Asia’s most important historic cities. Our focus will be on the many ways in which the dialectical relationships contained within this body of law – including the relationship between public heritage values and private property values, between the international and the domestic (national and local) regulatory orders, between expert knowledge and local communities, and between the tangible, immovable built heritage and its natural and intangible context – shape the recognition and regulation of built heritage of universal significance. Proposals that employ fresh perspectives to explore these relationships as well as contextual studies of particular cities and urban spaces are particularly welcome.