ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the management of historic urban cores in Iran, including the evolution of institutional settings and legislative framework. The chapter provides a history of different approaches to urban heritage management over time and analyses the relationship between different agencies involved in urban cultural heritage management on central and local levels. Iran has a strong centralized and top-down public sector approach to managing its urban cultural heritage, which has started to evolve only in the last decade to include more participatory approaches. Specifically, the management of historic urban cores falls under various specialized agencies with full operational and budgetary autonomy. The aim of the chapter is to understand the efficiency of the inter relationships among these agencies and councils. The chapter then lays out the problems faced by the historic urban cores in Iran, which include informality, unclear land and building ownership patterns, high poverty rate among the residents, and low quality of buildings. Additionally, the chapter outlines current institutions managing urban heritage and historic cores and their inter-relationships. The current legal framework for managing historic urban cores is also analysed. These discussions are then grounded in the case of the World Heritage site of the Historic City of Yazd.
