During a visit to the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) Taiwan in December, Vincent Nadin gave lectures on ‘urban planning for the heritage in Europe’. The lectures were based on work for the current international project ‘SHUC: Sustainable Futures for the Historic Urban Core funded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Heritage, and being conducted in cooperation with University College Dublin and Newcastle University. The topic of the lecture was especially relevant to NCKU as the university is based in Tainan, the Taiwanese city with the most complete built heritage and where there is a strong local ‘place identity. As in Europe the historic environment is under threat from development pressures and policies that prioritise economic growth. Vincent explained how in north-west Europe cities are promoting the economic value of the built heritage much more vigorously, but also that there are fundamental changes underway in the regulation of development in historic urban cores that may in the long run affect their identity.
