Heritage inventory as the base for a monitoring system in the world heritage city of Cuenca

The city Cuenca in Ecuador has a unique historic center, different qualities such as the urban layout, the townscape, and the successful fusion of the different societies and cultures, enhanced the nomination as a World Heritage Site (WHS) by the UNESCO in 1999. However, sixteen years after its recognition, most of the city's heritage assets have been exposed to gradual deterioration. Facing this reality, the VLIR project "World Heritage City Preservation Management" at the University of Cuenca worked on the implementation of management tools in accordance with the preventive conservation, maintenance and monitoring principles. As a result, a heritage inventory system was developed; nevertheless, the most important contribution is the articulation of the inventory with a monitoring system. Therefore, this paper will demonstrated the effort of a WHS in designing preventive conservation tools that could be separately implemented but lately integrated in a heritage management system.