Historic Urban Landscape Literature (2010–2024): A Scoping Review and Bibliometric Mapping of Conceptual Evolution and Research Trends

Adopted by UNESCO in 2011, the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) Recommendation consolidated earlier traditions of urban heritage conservation into a policy-oriented framework for managing change in historic cities. This embedded heritage management within sustainable urban development agendas, governance, and implementation tools. A review of HUL-related scholarship spanning from 2010 to 2024 sets the main focus of the current paper. The research engages two complementary perspectives: a bibliometric analysis of 172 publications drawn from ScienceDirect and ProQuest, and a bibliographic (thematic) review of 50 works, systematically isolated from the larger corpus, that directly engage with the concept. This study investigates how the HUL concept has evolved conceptually, how it has been interpreted across different research traditions, and to what extent current scholarship reflects or advances its intended methodological and operational scope. Bibliometric mapping was conducted using VOSviewer, supported by metadata generated in Zotero and organised through subsequent Excel classification, while the literature analysis employed a structured interpretive framework. Findings reveal that although direct references to the “HUL approach” remain limited, research frequently aligns with its core principles—sustainability, adaptive reuse, identity, and intangible values. Since 2019, case studies have expanded rapidly, spearheaded by projects carried out in China and Italy, marking a clear shift from theoretical elaboration to practical application. This transition has redirected scholarly attention from conceptual debates to the real-world challenges of participation, integration of local data, and balancing heritage management with urban development. The study concludes that effective HUL practice requires a professional mindset rooted in flexibility, interdisciplinarity, and continuous adaptation rather than prescriptive, checklist-driven methodologies.