Why high heritage endowments do not always translate into living support

Area of Science:

• Urban Governance
• Heritage Resource Management
• Sustainable Development

Background:

• The challenge of balancing heritage preservation with contemporary living support in historic cities remains underexplored.
• Existing research often overlooks the conversion process of fixed heritage endowments into usable urban amenities.
• This study addresses the gap by examining how heritage resources are transformed to support daily life in Chinese historical cities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the conversion of fixed heritage endowments into contemporary living support in Chinese national historical and cultural cities.
• To develop and apply indices for measuring heritage endowments and living support over time.
• To identify the conditions associated with living support conversion in areas with high heritage resources.

Main Methods:

• Development of a fixed heritage endowment index (fixed HEI) and comparable living support indices (comparable LSI) for 2012 and 2022.
• Application of Markov transition matrices, transition type profiling, and XGBoost-SHAP within a dual-scale framework (5 km grids and city/county units).
• Analysis of association structures including road network density, impervious surface area, and population density, with spatial lag checks.

Main Results:

• The proportion of grids with observable living support increased significantly from 45.58% in 2012 to 61.27% in 2022.
• In high-heritage resource areas, most grids maintained high heritage and living support (HL), with a notable portion transitioning to high heritage and high living support (HH).
• Road network density, impervious surface area, and population density were key factors associated with living support conversion, with neighborhood road density showing additional explanatory power.

Conclusions:

• High heritage endowments do not automatically guarantee high levels of living support.
• Heritage city governance needs to shift focus from static resource identification to actively managing resource conversion capacity.
• Effective urban governance in heritage cities requires strategies that facilitate the transformation of historical assets into functional contemporary amenities.