No abstract

The urban economists have stressed the importance of various amenities for the attractiveness of urban areas for residents and businesses and built cultural heritage can be considered as one of such amenities, the benefits of which should not be overlooked. This research was aimed to analyze the influence of heritage aspect including the heritage status or features of the building and the historic built environment in general on the real estate prices and development in Kaunas using hedonic price method. Two sets of data were collected for the analysis - general, including heritage buildings and including new construction since 2013. The research has demonstrated that heritage status and the year of construction (as older buildings can be considered having heritage features) have no significant positive influence on the real estate prices. Meanwhile, the location, heritage context and the architectural distinctiveness of new architecture have a direct influence on the real estate prices. The heritage context correlates with architectural quality of new construction as well. This reveals the benefits of heritage context both for the real estate developers and households; however, the study shows the unemployed social-economic potential of historic buildings as generators and maintainers of heritage context.

The article focuses on the notion of Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) introduced by the UNESCO in 2005 and 2011 responding to the expanding understanding of cultural heritage and the urgent call to reconcile heritage preservation and contemporary urban developments and re-introduce heritage as a driver of urban and overall societies development. The analysis of the fundamental and recent literature on the theoretical grounding and the applications of HUL had revealed numerous benefits of this concept including the integration potential, acknowledgement of intangible dimensions of heritage and the values of contemporary architecture; however, several challenges and conflicts were identified as well: the challenge of the search of valuable historical patterns, the questions of what extent of change of historic environment is acceptable, and the underlying tension between the call to conserve the existing valuable historical fabric and the urge to employ heritage as the driver for high quality future development. The research suggests that the understanding of the notion of authenticity plays the fundamental role in the success of the HUL approach and, after reviewing the contemporary ideas on heritage authenticity, introduces permanent pervading authenticity, which would allow searching for valuable development patterns based on kairos time instead of chronos in the frame of the HUL concept.

For sustainable development, it is important to ensure healthy life and well-being for all ages, promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, productive employment and decent work, take urgent action to combat climate change and its effects and protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. Taking into account the negative effects of climate change, the degrading effects of contemporary conventional industrial scale agricultural practices, the declining everyday physical activity of the working age people in developed countries, and other problems related to indoor work, this research proposes the office concept entitled FO-AM (Forest-Office Administrative (function) Movement) that allows to gradually move from sitting to walking while working in purposefully created or adapted forest areas. Numerous studies have been conducted on the positive effects of the natural environment on human health and productivity. A study published by Australian researchers revealed that sitting time is directly linked to all-cause mortality. While research results call for effective innovations for reducing the amount of time spent sitting and encouraging people, especially urban residents, to connect with nature, no effective holistic solutions have been found yet. The article presents a literature review on the contemporary office-nature space integration trends and the existing technical and design solutions and contemporary re-naturalization practices of ex-urban areas and presents the conceptual idea of landscape technology FO-AM allowing to transfer the functions of administrative buildings to the semi-natural and natural environment, including partially anthropogenic environment, park, forest park and natural forest, and in this way to address public health and well-being, economic innovation and climate change issues, thus contributing to the long-term sustainability goals.

The article focuses on the phenomenon of myth, which cannot be seen and may not even exist based on empirical evidence, although it can function as a long-lasting wave inceptor, as demonstrated in numerous cases in history. The singular presence of myth has no linear time, and the way to approach the concealed mythic meaning that is beyond tales, oral traditions or ritual practices is based on language and narrative. Narrative is how myth manifests itself in the temporal layers of discourse through collective decision-making processes within cultures and in places. The urban cultural heritage seems to be a promising source of understanding of what sort of narrative history has been telling. We emphasize that the closest possible approach to the permanence of myth lies in this subtle between-epoch or between-generational moment wherein the discourse alters. The hermeneutics of repetition within alteration processes is what could be called the narrative of cultural heritage in towns and cities. Development of the physical heritage properties has been touched by a variety of agents, and therefore it must have gathered a nearly unlimited amount of explicit and implicit knowledge. The research further demonstrates how the myth–narrative–discourse interaction affects our understanding of the authenticity of heritage objects, shifting towards a permanent pervading authenticity which could be intensive or extensive in the tangible realm. The case of Šiluva is discussed in order to explain how myth can be used practically in placemaking.