The Impact of Heritage Values on Public Perception of Architectural Conservation in Suleimani City

Abstract

This paper aims to discover individuals’ perceptions of Suleimani city’s heritage buildings before and after architectural conservation, as part of a thesis about heritage awareness. Acknowledging that awareness is the ability to perceive and perception is affected by different heritage values that people attach to their built heritage. However, in the architectural conservation process in Suleimani city, some heritage values are neglected, or missing, due to various reasons, and this issue has affected public perception of heritage buildings. Therefore, in this paper, several heritage values have been selected to evaluate the public perception of built heritage in Suleimani city. Because understanding the built heritage and its impact on individual and community heritage awareness depends on how the community perceives and experiences its heritage. This study explores local perceptions of heritage buildings in Suleimani city by using the Semantic Differential Scale (SDS) measure, to analyze the responses of participants in a questionnaire survey. As well as, an evaluation has been made of selected heritage buildings to clarify the reflection of heritage values in Architectural conservation. Different results were found between perceived heritage values in the conserved buildings. By examining local perceptions of architectural conservation, this study contributes to the idea of the built environment's human-centeredness. Assuming that local views of the built heritage directly impact conservation efforts and heritage-driven solutions.