« | Home | »

Value of urban built heritage: From professionals point of view

By Admin | July 21, 2009

The built heritage which belongs to different historical periods represents valuable assets for modern society. They provide valuable testimony about architecture and concepts of town planning. These properties which are of cultural, spiritual, religious or historical importance are under several threats. Especially these properties in urban areas face the challenges of urbanization. Accordingly there is a need for conservation and management of such properties along with the urban development programs. The under estimation or the complete absence of knowledge on how valuable is urban built heritage is one of the key issues in this regard. The intention of this research is therefore to assess the economic value of historical properties in urban areas.

Contingent valuation (CV) method was adopted as the methodology and the Fort area of city of Colombo was selected as the study area which has the highest number of historical buildings. The sample included professionals, for example, valuators, town planners, architects, lecturers who were selected from the available lists of professionals. An open ended question format was used in the CV questionnaire.

Results indicate the high level of protests bids. The mean willingness to pay was Rs 5109. Although the multiple regression estimates agree with standard economic test, there were no significant models that could explain the variation of the sample adequately. The factors that lead to the high protest bids and the need of other types of multivariate models that describe the sample adequately are discussed.

Janaki Edirisinghe1, U A D P Gunawardena2 and Malik Ranasinghe3

1Department of Estate Management and Valuation, University of Sri Jayewardenepura
2Department of Forestry and Environmental Science, University of Sri Jayewardenepura
3University of Moratuwa

Topics: Economics, symposium2008 | No Comments »

Comments