Segovia, heritage and city. From the Special Plan for Historic Areas to the Smart Digital Project: New strategies for heritage planning and preservation

Abstract

The Special Plan for Historic Areas of Segovia (PEAHIS) has been finally approved, after more than 10 years of work and uncertainty, in the municipal session of September 6, 2019. A century of interventions, debates, proposals, projects, urban planning and heritage conservation that had finally led the city of Segovia to its declaration as a World Heritage City in 1985 was left behind. Since then, new conservation and urban planning policies have finally led to the final document for the management and control of the architecture and urban planning of the city of Segovia. The result has been a necessarily interdisciplinary project full of values and controversies and contradictions, successes, and errors, which over more than 10 years has conditioned the conservation, management and image of the city and its cultural assets. The new Plan has been oriented towards the conservation, restoration, rehabilitation and revitalization of the historic areas and their unique elements, organising and protecting the city’s historic complex from an urban and cultural point of view. However, it is a complex that extends beyond the initial historic areas to encompass the double reality that has characterized and singularized the urban form since its origin: the double settlement on the rock (walled enclosure) and in the surrounding valleys (historic suburbs) next to the fertile plains of the two rivers (Eresma and Clamores) that surround it, and the new growth from them.

Now, 4 years after its implementation, the new Management Plan for the City of Segovia is at an advanced stage of drafting, as a support tool for the planning of strategies that combine the protection, conservation and management of this space, both converging in the announced and delayed Smart Digital Segovia project that, from the central administration (National Plan for Smart Cities of Spain) began to be developed in 2018. Implementing a central Smart City core that, starting from an updated graphic base, georeferencing and geolocation, develops a management and information processing system that allows its digitization and public availability of most of the information of the Local Administration, structured in nine major lines of action among which Smart Urban Planning (Architecture and Urban Planning) stands out, in a convergence with the other Plans that highlights the importance and need for new digital tools and techniques focused on heritage conservation and management.