Eye of Sustainable Planning: A Conceptual Heritage-Led Urban Regeneration Planning Framework

Implementation and integration of sustainable development within a management framework is the main problem of urban regeneration projects. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a sustainable heritage-led urban regeneration planning framework, which will act as an urban regeneration project life cycle model and aid sustainable planning and decision-making processes for project managers. First, a literature review is used to conceptualise the first version of the sustainable planning framework. Then, it is validated by conducting interviews with professionals in Northern Cyprus. Sustainable heritage-led urban regeneration planning problems exist in the case study region. Therefore, the data collected for this research is significant to the research problem. Results showed that there is a lack of knowledge towards heritage-led urban regeneration among the local community and it is the main source of sustainable planning problems. Therefore, a questionnaire survey is conducted to validate this problem. The results validated that there is a sustainability perception difference between the local community and professionals, and the knowledge level of the local community was not satisfactory. Finally, a knowledge management system is introduced in the final version of the framework in order to empower stakeholders, and the “eye of sustainable planning” is introduced. Perception differences between the local community and professionals and the lack of knowledge of the local community towards heritage-led urban regeneration is introduced by this research. This study is limited to heritage-led regeneration projects and future studies may extend the scope of this study to different countries.