Programme

Symposium on the Habitability of Historic Centers

Towards a New Urban Project (2022-2026)

17e OWHC World Congress, Cordoba (Spain)

September 24 to 27, 2024

CONTEXT

The 16th World Congress in Quebec City (September 2022) has brought together the member cities of the OWHC around a political vision based on a lucid and implacable observation: the combination of current crises, exacerbated by climate change, is creating complex situations that require us to renew our ways of managing and developing cities, and in particular World Heritage cities. The objetive set on this occasion is to endow the OWHC with a New Urban Project, designed to identify and share city planning solutions that reunite the human, the urban and nature.

The mandate given to the General Secretariat to initiate the process was to implement the Québec Roadmap. The participative engineering it created, unprecedented for the Organization, enabled some forty cities to learn from each other and engage in collective reflection. With this impetus, the Panel of Mayors defined the initial political vision in a Manifiesto and set out the major Issues at stake to be met:

• Adapting cities to climate change and reducing its impact
• Capitalizing on the ability of historic districts to reinvent themselves
• Enhancing the features that make the livability of the heritage city
• Promoting heritage as an essential resource for sustainable development

The thematic reflections carried out by the 12 Collaborative Networks have reformulated four Strategic Axes that give direction to future Habitability-based interventions:

• Requalify the habitat
• Refresh the city
• Transform mobility
• Regenerate the urban environment

CORDOBA SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

The Cordoba Symposium will take stock of the Quebec Roadmap and mark an important milestone in the “Towards a New Urban Project” process. The specific objectives of the Symposium are to:

• Broaden consensus among member cities on the political vision and added value for the OWHC network of completing its political and operational evolution.
• Share the results of the Québec Roadmap.
• Formalize progress on the New Urban Project.
• Propose the form and content of the work that remains to be done in 2025 and 2026 to lead the OWHC “Towards a New Urban Project”.

The Symposium Program consists of the following elements:

• Four site visits through the streets of Cordoba will introduce the Symposium (late morning September 24). They will enable participants to meet and get to know each other, and to familiarize themselves with the Québec Roadmap through the presentation of the EStrategic Axes and their implications in relation to the Manifiesto.
• In a plenary session, the Mayors' Panel will present the political results of the collective work underway since 2022 (Session 1, September 25 afternoon). The bold orientations based on Habitability will form the backdrop to the Symposium and serve as a starting point for discussion. Habitability assumes that the human being is at the heart of any action on the city, that pre-eminence must be given to the inhabitant, to the original social role of public spaces, and to the inscription of urban evolution in historical continuity. The main idea is that the city is first and foremost a place for living, working, socializing, cultivating, forming a community and opening up to others.
• Collaborative Networks will be animating a series of workshops throughout the day on September 26:
  • Divided up according to their relationship to the Strategic Axes, four parallel workshops will be led by the Collaborative Networks (Session 2, September 26 morning). They will involve elected officials and municipal experts according to their mandates or skills, with a view to validating or developing the findings presented by the Collaborative Networks. The components of Habitability and the courses of action they inspire will be discussed with a view to formulating concrete, achievable recommendations likely to enrich current or planned initiatives in member cities. Through this dynamic and creative exercise, all member cities will be able to:
    • Take ownership of the results of the work carried out (especially for cities that have not yet been able to get involved in the Collaborative Networks);
    • Convince one another of the benefits of participative engineering.
  • All participants will be invited to complete the proposals concerning the constituent elements of the New Urban Project (Session 3, September 26 afternoon). Round-table discussions will address the scope of the changes brought about by the New Urban Project, within the OWHC and its member cities, and the implications of habitability as a fundamental principle.
• At the conclusion of the Symposium, the results of the Symposium presented by the elected officials and the discussion led by the Panel of Mayors, will involve all the participants and the international partners invited to Cordoba (Session 4, September 27 morning). The conclusions will lead to proposals for subsequent activities, marking the start of a new phase in the process that should culminate in the adoption of the New Urban Project at the 18th OWHC World Congress in 2026. The proposed activities will be discussed at the final session of the General Assembly for the adoption of the 2025-2026 action plan and budget.