How can digital footprints reveal multilevel perceptions of urban heritage? An analysis based on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach

Abstract The formation of the concept of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) not only applied the landscape approach to heritage studies but also shifted attention towards the layered social and cultural values of heritage. However, conventional heritage research remains largely confined to a single spatial scale, neither adequately revealing the variation in perceptions across different levels nor resonating with the expanding connotations of the HUL approach. This limits the identification of heritage values because HUL conservation requires understanding how people experience and value places in different spatial settings. In the context of new data environments, converting unstructured digital footprints into structured numerable data helps in the layered interpretation of complex information anchored in HUL. Therefore, this study attempts to establish a new research paradigm using digital footprints to systematically explore multilevel heritage perception in historic urban areas at the macro, meso and micro levels. This study integrates multilevel perception analysis under the HUL framework with the spatiotemporal information and interactive features of various types of digital footprints. The results demonstrate that a landscape approach to heritage perception research can effectively identify personalised recreational needs and historically shaped aesthetic preferences, thereby supporting more human-centred heritage conservation.