Built cultural heritage between its uniqueness and the need for planning regulations

• Abstract: Unlike the intangible cultural heritage and the movable heritage, as com-ponents of urban and rural tissue, the historic buildings and the protected built areas are (also) subject to planning regulations meant to govern the given settlements as well as possible. On the other hand, as it is known, one of the three major cultural value types assigned, whenever appropriate, to ed-ifices, to built ensembles, to parts of or even to whole towns and villages, is referring to their status of uniqueness or, at least, of rar-ity. As a consequence, unlike the intangible cultural heritage and the movable heritage, built cultural heritage exists within the inter-ference area between the need to preserve its particular character and the need to gen-eralise imposed by urban planning instru-ments. Some of the issues resulting from this paradox have been identified, defined and illustrated by means of recent case studies.