Heritage 2010 was a state-of-the-art event regarding the relationship between forms of heritage and the conceptual framework for sustainable development. The four dimensions of sustainable development—environment, economics, society, and culture—were brought together in order to define a particular approach on how to deal with and go beyond the traditional aspects of heritage preservation and safeguarding. As heritage is no longer just a memory or a cultural reference, or even a place or an object, some deeper conceptualization is needed in order to place heritage in its present context. The concept of heritage is moving toward broader and wider scenarios, where it often becomes the driving force for commerce, business, leisure, and educational politics. Heritage is currently seen, or referred to, only through its cultural definition. However, sustainable development brings heritage concepts to another dimension, as it establishes profound relationships with economics, environment, and social aspects. Consequently, heritage preservation and safeguarding is facing new and complex problems. Degradation of heritage sites is not any more just a result of materials ageing or environmental actions. Factors such as global and local pollution, climate change, poverty, religion, tourism, commerce, ideologies, and war are now on the cutting edge for the emerging of new approaches, concerns, and visions on heritage. Thus, the “Heritage 2010: Heritage and Sustainable Development” conference was conceived to embrace a global view on how heritage is being contextualized with the four dimensions of sustainable development. Furthermore, heritage, governance, and education were brought into discussion as the key factors for enlightenment of future global strategies for heritage preservation and safeguarding.

Heritage 2010 featured two keynote speakers: Giorgio Croci (University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Italy), who presented a session entitled “Seismic Behaviour of Historical buildings,” and John Tunbridge (Carleton University, Canada), who spoke about “Sustainable Communities: The Roles of Heritage and Tourism.” Croci's presentation opened the conference and provided a short history of the seismic behavior of some of the most important monuments, showing the kind of damage that they have suffered and the different capacity to resist to earthquakes in relation to their structural characteristics. Some major examples were presented, for example, the Coliseum of Rome and the Tower of Pisa. Tunbridge's lecture, which closed the event, looked at sustainable development in relation to heritage and tourism. He considered the role of local community participation in achieving sustainability and argued that local sustainable development should be promoted not only through inclusive heritage and its presentation to global tourism markets, also but by the reciprocal influence of global tourism values upon local heritage presentation, resulting in a local–global “creolization” of heritage values.

The main topics of the conference, organized in parallel sessions, were “Heritage and Governance for Development,” “Heritage and Education Policies,” “Heritage and Culture,” “Heritage and Economics,” “Heritage and Environment,” and “Heritage and Society.” The total number of papers presented (and published in the Proceedings) exceeded 150, and more than 35 countries were represented. During the conference a workshop on tourism, “The Tourism Destiny of Cultural World Heritage Sites: Focus on Management Issues,” was organized by World Heritage Tourism Research Network (WHTRN) under the coordination of Myriam Jansen-Verbeke (University of Leuven, Belgium) and E. Wanda George (Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Canada).

The outcome of this conference can be summarized by two main aspects: during the event scholars, experts and researchers from all over the world gathered in one of the Portuguese UNESCO heritage sites and deeply discussed the linkage between heritage and sustainable development; and the Proceedings of this conference are a repository of some of the most recent and representative research, field work, and theoretical discussion concerning heritage and sustainable development.