World Heritage Potential: the Role of Heritage Sites on the Development of Hilla’s City Center

Abstract

Cultural heritage areas (World Heritage Sites) have long stood as prominent symbols of historical and cultural civilizations in their respective environments and today serve as a strong incentive for attracting both local and international tourists. However, the urban expansion driven by rapid population growth has led to challenges, including the differentiation of their urban fabric. This highlights an urgent need to develop these cultural and tourist urban nodes and integrate them into the urban development trends of the city. Sustainable development has become a pressing agenda for such cities to protect and revitalize cultural areas and enhance accessibility to them. The study aims to evaluate the spatial configuration of the city of Babylon (within the center of Al-Hillah city, including the World Heritage Site of Babylon) over a twenty-year period (2004-2024). The research addresses a knowledge gap: The absence of precise quantitative analysis of the study area within both local and global studies, which provides a true impression of the urban development trajectory experienced by the city over the past two decades and assesses the effectiveness of the World Heritage Site as a dynamic urban node within the city. The study applied the method of space syntax and conducted axial and segment analyses based on the city's street network data for the years 2004 and 2024, measuring Depthmap X 0.8.0 program indicators related to the research vocabularies (choice, connectivity, integration, intelligibility, synergy). The analysis results indicated that the current spatial configuration of the city achieved higher values in the choice and connectivity indicators. However, the integration indicator recorded a higher value in the past, due to the significant expansion that the center of Al-Hillah city witnessed towards the south of the historic city, while the eastern and western directions achieved medium values. This underscores the development axes that should be focused on to activate and enhance land use in the areas surrounding and adjacent to the historical site.