Issues of authenticity and cultural identity in urban environmental design

This study looks at the environment as an object of design within the context of a cultural landscape and determines authenticity and identity as the main conditions for inclusion of design artefacts within an urban cultural landscape. Design is aimed at organizing living spaces that symbolize and express social closeness, community identity, social values, norms, and rules of behavior. In an urban cultural landscape, environmental identity must be symbolically constructed and reproduced as the lack of meaningful and competitive representations of the ways of life may result in deterioration of a local culture. Design may fulfil this creative mission by transforming the urgent needs, values and meanings into relevant images and forms of the object-spatial environment.