Community practices in conserving cultural heritage in rural cultural landscapes: The case of cappadocia cemil village

Cultural heritage conservation has evolved over time from being a technical practice based on the structural integrity of heritage, to a socio-cultural one emphasizing community-assigned meanings and values. Strengthened by critical heritage studies, this approach highlights that heritage is not only defined by its physical attributes but also reproduced through cultural continuity, social bonds, and everyday practices. However, Turkey's current legal and institutional framework provides limited support for the application of such community-based approaches. Approaches grounded in the relationships communities establish with are crucial for developing a conservation perspective that places community at its core. Rural cultural landscapes - settlements where communities maintain distinctive connections with both the natural and built environment and organize their daily practices accordingly - offer significant potential for such research. In this context, this study examines how communities sustain cultural heritage in rural cultural landscapes where authorized interventions, such as plans, restorations, or street rehabilitation projects, are absent. Focusing on Cemil Village (Ürgüp, Nevşehir), the study investigates community-based conservation practices through ethnographic and spatial research. Drawing on cultural heritage conservation, rural cultural landscape, and place attachment, it examines how community–heritage relationships shape conservation practices across individual, social, and spatial dimensions. The findings, based on spatial analyses and in-depth interviews, reveal that conservation practices are driven by five key motivations: preserving historical and cultural symbols, maintaining connections with the natural environment, sustaining the structural qualities of traditional buildings, ensuring the continuity of agricultural activities, and fostering social bonds within the community. Local practices that sustain heritage in the absence of formal interventions are shaped by these motivations in conjunction with different dimensions of place attachment (individual, social, and spatial) and the interventions applied to traditional structures. Findings indicate that community conservation practices in Cemil Village range from strong practices supported by regular maintenance and local techniques to weaker practices limited by available resources and lower place attachment, demonstrating that community-level conservation is multidimensional. The case of Cemil Village illustrates that cultural heritage in rural cultural landscapes endures not through legal or institutional mechanisms but through the multidimensional bonds communities establish with place. These findings contribute theoretically to critical, community-based approaches in heritage conservation and provide a unique basis for developing community-oriented policies for rural heritage areas in Turkey.