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The municipalities, faced with the obliga-tion to generate property appraisals, have predom-inantly used the comparison method, characterized by submitting to the distortions of the land market, excluding the explicit consideration of factors that value it. This article presents a method of valuing urban land massively, based on the generation of land rents that value the property and that in its capitalized form are expressed in its price. Through the application in the city of Cuenca, a set of pro-cedures is established for the determination of the base unit price, identifying for this the capital incor-porated into the land in infrastructures and equip-ment, and quantifying the most relevant primary and secondary rents from the expressions of the spatial structure of land uses linked to their gener-ation. The results obtained show that the theory of land rent is applicable to the massive valuation of urban land for cadastral purposes, obtaining a sig-nificant degree of understanding of the conforma-tion of land prices in the city associated with their dynamics

In urban and rural areas of the Andean cities of Ecuador, construction based on earthen technologies has been an important alternative, which are carried out through ancestral customs, such as the minga, which benefit the cohesion of the community. Against this background, the World Heritage City Project of the University of Cuenca (Ecuador) has since the year 2011 undertaken interventions in heritage buildings inspired by the minga, so called Maintenance Campaigns, where the collective efforts of various actors (community, academy and organizations) are joined to recover buildings in highly vulnerable heritage neighborhoods, promoting preventive conservation, maintenance and monitoring of vernacular buildings. The fourth campaign, which was carried out in 2018, took place in the Las Herrerias Street in the historical El Vergel neighborhood of Cuenca, a World Heritage City since 1999. The methodology applied in the previous campaigns was essentially maintained, gaining experience and innovating at every opportunity. As a special aspect, the Las Herrerias Campaign was characterized by the existence of buildings with structures that were already affected by civil works previously carried out, such as re-pavements, drinking water installations, various services, etc. This research proposes to establish conservation strategies of vernacular heritage buildings and to mitigate the effects of poorly carried out civil works. The buildings intervened in the 2018 campaign are taken as reference, specifically those whose damages are the result of civil works. First, a review of bibliographic sources is undertaken to reveal historical data about the neighborhood and the civil works that have been carried out. The research continues with a diagnosis of the condition of the buildings before the Maintenance Campaign. Next, the daily maintenance records and the experience of the participants of the Campaign are investigated to identify and analyze those buildings affected by bad ci

The role of heritage documentation has proven beneficial for the conservation and management of built heritage. Different tools has supported the recording of buildings, city buildings blocks and sites. However, in most of the heritage sites a lack of systematic methodologies for adequate data analysis has revealed the misusing of heritage documentation. Thus, sites enlisted as World Heritage Sites (WHS) by the UNESCO, are dealing with values that remain at the urban scale, while the documentation activities are focused mainly in buildings.These situation suits to many sites in developing countries, such as the historic city of Cuenca, at the south of Ecuador. The UNESCO included Cuenca as a WHS in 1999 due to important heritage features. Nevertheless, these heritage values remain at the city level, while the documentation tools and used techniques are focused in individual elements making more difficult the control and management decision-making at the city level. In this context, this research contributes to heritage management; by exploring documentation techniques that provide detailed information and that support heritage analysis at different scales from the urban level, city building blocks and heritage building.Thereby, the digital aerial photogrammetry, orthomosaics and Model Digital Terrain (MDT) were used to allow the acquisition of an aerial representation of the historic landscape of the city. These data combined with other existing heritage registers, enable the identification and analysis of different valuable elements at different scales. The results has demonstrated that combination of different heritage tools improves heritage conservation with less economic resources.

The Historic Center of Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca was incorporated in 1999 to the UNESCTO World Heritage List. However, the absence of conservation policies has led to the lost of the heritage values on which the listing criteria of Cuenca are based. In this respect, this research proposes to use a supervised classification method known as Support Vector Machines (SVM) to determine heritage elements that need to be monitored at a territorial scale. The results have shown a real possibility to control different elements accurately with a low computational load.

The proper control of built heritage entails many challenges related to the complexity of heritage elements and the extent of the area to be managed, for which the available resources must be efficiently used. In this scenario, the preventive conservation approach, based on the concept that prevent is better than cure, emerges as a strategy to avoid the progressive and imminent loss of monuments and heritage sites. Regular monitoring appears as a key tool to identify timely changes in heritage assets. This research demonstrates that the supervised learning model (Support Vector Machines - SVM) is an ideal tool that supports the monitoring process detecting visible elements in aerial images such as roofs structures, vegetation and pavements. The linear, gaussian and polynomial kernel functions were tested; the lineal function provided better results over the other functions. It is important to mention that due to the high level of segmentation generated by the classification procedure, it was necessary to apply a generalization process through opening a mathematical morphological operation, which simplified the over classification for the monitored elements.

The proper control of built heritage entails many challenges related to the complexity of heritage elements and the extent of the area to be managed, for which the available resources must be efficiently used. In this scenario, the preventive conservation approach, based on the concept that prevent is better than cure, emerges as a strategy to avoid the progressive and imminent loss of monuments and heritage sites. Regular monitoring appears as a key tool to identify timely changes in heritage assets. This research demonstrates that the supervised learning model (Support Vector Machines - SVM) is an ideal tool that supports the monitoring process detecting visible elements in aerial images such as roofs structures, vegetation and pavements. The linear, gaussian and polynomial kernel functions were tested; the lineal function provided better results over the other functions. It is important to mention that due to the high level of segmentation generated by the classification procedure, it was necessary to apply a generalization process through opening a mathematical morphological operation, which simplified the over classification for the monitored elements.

Studies about the role of Cultural Heritage in development process has gained attention on international forums in the ultimate decades. In this context, experts from the economic field, have contributed to estimate the economic benefits of immovable heritage conservation. At international level, one of the domains long studied, is the relationship between Immovable Cultural Heritage & Tourism, reveling it can imply benefits or adverse impacts for conservation. Therefore, the need to develop or to improve monitoring tools, has been emphasized. In this regard, cultural mapping technique have contributed to identifying, recording, and classifying cultural elements in a geographical site. Moreover, linked to inventory data-bases, cultural mapping tool allows to monitor different attributes of built cultural heritage, in a systematic way. At the same time, it reveals spatial relationships with economic activities around cultural heritage properties, providing better insight into the cultural heritage performance of the site. The present article summarizes the findings of cultural mapping technique applied to reveal Economic Landscapes of built cultural heritage at the Historic City Centre of Cuenca, Ecuador. For the present analysis, two databases, were used. The first one, related to the built heritage inventory and, the second one, corresponds to cadastral information about touristic goods and services. Besides, field-work was required to confirm missing information. Thematic maps were built to assess the relationship between touristic services and built heritage environment. A base-line, has been built and, relevant findings between values, functions, state of conservation and spatial location, has been revealed.