Assessing the cultural significance of World Heritage cities: the historic centre of Galle as case study

This article presents the first results of a survey on the historic centre of Galle. Galle is one of the many
World Heritage cities as acknowledged by the World Heritage Committee (WHC), UNESCO. The Historic
centre of Galle is a case study that is part of a larger research program called ‘Outstanding Universal Value,
World Heritage cities and Sustainability: Surveying the relationship between the Outstanding Universal
Value assessment practices and the sustainable development of World Heritage Cities’ led by the Eindhoven
University of Technology, the Netherlands; and UNESCO World Heritage Centre, France.
The aim of the research is to determine the adequacy of the current strategies of the stakeholders involved
with the policy and management of sustainable development of the historic town of Galle. The main question
therefore is: how can the historic centre of Galle develop sustainably, without damaging its Outstanding Uni-
versal Value? This paper will focus on the results of the literature study and the survey of official UNESCO
documents undertaken to assess the cultural significance of the historic centre of Galle, by means of revealing
the dimensions of its cultural significance in terms of cultural values. The paper will conclude with an illus-
trative test case where the study of documents and literature are complemented by the preliminary results
of our fieldwork.