Walkspace as cultural heritage within urban landscape

The focus of this research is to explore the urban landscape through the promenade notion and contemporary walkability strategies to connect open spaces into a walkspace system. The research on urban public spaces seen as a walkspace system points out specific models of alternative urban heritage. These models are characterized by presence of diverse cultural heritage and pedestrian connections which should be recognised in current design and city planning procedures. The aim is to create awareness of heritage values in practices of everyday life using public space as a mediator and spatial networking as a planning criterion. The identified walkspace models came out of case study comparisons in five cities: London, Barcelona, Budapest, New York and Madrid. The case studies represent diverse urban landscapes as pedestrian streets, boulevards and linear urbanscapes. These examples confirm that streets are not just traffic corridors and show ways in which streetscapes form walkspace systems in different scales. Pedestrianisations, landscaped streets, historic park-streets and urbanscape parks are strategies which interconnect cultural heritage and create new heritage of contemporary promenades through public space design. Walkspace systems are the basis for heritage urbanism approach as means of achieving vitality and quality of public space in heritage revitalization.