Why and How We Should Inherit Urban Environmental Cultural Resources: Identifying, Listing, Evaluating, and Making Good Use of Urban Environmental Cultural Resources in Asia

A city as a spatial expanse includes people as well as different natural and artif icial elements. Let us regard the entirety of such a city as “the urban environment”: a stage for human lives, including its space and all the elements within. To classify these various elements is basic to considering and preserving the urban environment, though there are different ways of classification depending on one's purpose. If one intends to build, for example, such elements should be considered as civil engineering works, architecture, other artificial urban constituents, and nature, which correspond respectively to the academic fields of civil engineering, architecture, urban engineering, and landscape design. Such classification, however, cannot cover other inherent urban elements such as air and water, and wastes that are discharged by our urban activities

Therefore, for the purpose of this program that intends to cover all the elements within the urban environment and to manage their sustainable development, it should better suit us to adopt a new viewpoint in which these elements can be regarded as usable “resources,” leaving aside the established academic structure.