From Heritage Valuation to Evidence-Based Computational Heritage Town Planning: Methodological Development and Application of the Cultural Heritage Town Development Index

The notion of heritage assessment has evolved from valuing monuments in isolation to recognizing heritage as complex socio-economic cultural systems. While the early approaches emphasized tangibility, later shifting to tourism potential, and economic valuation methods, where the heritage context was seldom considered. Subsequent frameworks have incorporated economic impact and sectoral development while specifically focusing on economic returns or heritage conservation. In recent years, integrated frameworks and management toolkits have broadened scope to include social, governance, and cultural aspects. However, frameworks remained generic or significantly oriented to the cultural heritage, lacking context-sensitive approaches tailored to the heritage ecosystem. This study aims to develop Cultural Heritage Town Development Index (CHTDI), a comprehensive framework that unifies conservation, socio-economic, physical, environmental, economic, and developmental aspects. Formulated using a three-stage integrated Delphi–AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) technique and PCA (Principal Component Analysis), this framework integrates six-dimensional criteria comprising parameters ranging from heritage-specific aspects to community participation, tourism, infrastructure, economy, cultural entrepreneurship, development policy, revenue generation, etc. The application of CHTDI to heritage towns in India demonstrates its diagnostic capacity to reveal sectoral gaps and aids evidence-based urban planning, representing the future of heritage assessment, and advancing value-centric models to comprehensive heritage ecosystem evaluation.