Built Heritage Management Challenges in the Areas of Rural-Urban Interface

Urban sprawl and management of rural-urban interface remains the relevant area of research of the last decades. Urban sprawl usually absorbs such relicts of rural environment as the residencies of former manors, fragments of rural settlements, individual buildings. Intensification of concentration of the anthropogeneous processes, shifts in ecological situation, and changes of surrounding visual environment cause threats to the identity and even the survival of rural heritage objects closely linked to their authentic settings. The analyses demonstrate the trends of negative changes of the physical state of rural heritage objects affected by the processes of urbanization. Nevertheless, the urbanization in the vicinity of the relicts of rural landscape cannot be seen solely as negative. The intensification of social and economic processes in urbanized areas and the identity and the distinctiveness of the relicts of rural environment can encourage developing peri-urban areas with the unique sense of place with attractive peripheral centers and to preserve rural heritage adding new values and meanings to it. In order to highlight the opportunities and challenges of management of built heritage in the areas of rural-urban interface, the article presents the results of the sociological research on the state and preservation possibilities of the rural relicts in the urban settings.