Heritopolis—from Historic Urban Landscape to Metropolitan Heritage: rethinking heritage for the century of the metropolis

The 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape marked a decisive shift in heritage thinking by extending conservation beyond monuments and historic centres to embrace the broader urban context. Since then, however, metropolitan regions have become the dominant spatial, demographic and economic form of human settlement, exposing conceptual and operational limitations in heritage frameworks still largely centred on the city. The metropolitan condition requires more than a spatial enlargement of heritage: it calls for a reconsideration of its conceptual foundations. Building upon the principles of the Historic Urban Landscape while engaging with debates on metropolitan governance, spatial sustainability and complexity, the paper proposes Metropolitan Heritage as an interpretative framework rather than a new heritage category. Metropolitan Heritage is defined as a dynamic system of relationships linking culture and nature, urban and rural territories, infrastructures, ecological processes and multiple identities across metropolitan regions. Drawing on the experience of the Heritopolis initiative, the paper argues that heritage can become a strategic framework for governing metropolitan territories while contributing to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda.