Culture and Region: A Multidimensional Evaluation of Monuments

The issue of assessing the compound socioeconomic and historicocultural values of monuments is addressed. Monuments are part of the historical and cultural heritage of a country, region, or city. They are a potential source of economic development (for example, by means of tourism), but they also have their own indigenous value. A plea is made for planning for preservation of the cultural heritage by emphasizing the intangible attributes of urban monuments. In this context, the notion of option value plays an important role. The actual compound evaluation of cultural monuments, based on both user value and option value, is then undertaken by means of a recently developed multicriteria technique for qualitative assessment, namely the regime method. The method is briefly described and next applied to evaluate the socioeconomic and functional-urban value as well as the historicocultural value of twenty churches in the city of Thessaloniki. The results are presented in visual form by means of bar charts pertaining to three different types of scenarios. These outcomes appear to be reasonably robust across all scenarios. Some remarks are made about the use of such methods in the broader context of monument restoration policy.