Emergent Urbanism & Beyond: Times of Transformation and Paradigm Shifts with a Twist on Heritage Urbanism

Abstract

This paper is the product of reflections on the consequences of the latest discoveries of Emergent Urbanism that the authors identify as the specific issue dominating today's urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. In the paper we reflectively also discuss ideas about urban heritage, urban planning & design, and how heritage and planning & design can contribute to urban development. Urban heritage is understood as an infrastructure comparable with other infrastructures that provide an arena for urban planning & design and urban social and economic development. Moreover, the paper includes a remodeled and novel, short discussion and standpoint about five contemporary urban planning & design ideals that dominate the contemporary planning & design discourse, and their different views of the past and urban heritage. The paper concludes that in any given situation and context, the dominating urban planning & design ideal define the specific urban heritage, and, thus, influence how we will understand the past—today and in the future but also the paper maintains that, we must equally recognize how forces of economic, social and spatial structural change contribute to shaping the contemporary urban landscape.