The Delft Roundtable will be the first of four major, annual events bringing together all partner institutes of the Urban Knowledge Network Asia. This year’s roundtable focuses on one of the three main themes of UKNA’s research: urban heritage.

Deliberations will centre on the position of urban heritage, both built as well as intangible, within urban planning and redevelopment. The case study for the discussion will be the city of Delft. Lessons from planning approaches related to heritage in Delft, and more widely, the Netherlands and Western Europe, will be critically compared and contrasted with experiences in Asian cities. In the morning, the heritage department of Delft University of Technology’s Architecture Faculty will join hands with the Municipality of Delft to organise an excursion of urban redevelopment projects in the city of Delft. In the afternoon, a roundtable discussion, open to a wider audience of policy makers, academics, researchers and civil society representatives, will take place. The following question will be debated:

What is the position of heritage within modern urban planning?
How do current policies and approaches in the Netherlands and Europe differ from those in major Asian (particularly Chinese and Indian) cities?
How can the two learn from each other?