In 2011, UNESCO adopted the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) recommendation and called for the application of a landscape approach to ensure the integration of cultural heritage policies and management concerns in the wider goals of sustainable urban development. This paper tracks the genesis of a landscape approach to heritage conservation, and then presents a systematic review of the literature on the HUL. More than 100 publications from 2010 to early 2018 were analysed. The applied methodology combined an inductive categorization method with a deductive data mining method. The objective is to determine whether the academic discussion is addressing the different dimensions of the HUL approach, including the holistic, integrated, and value-based dimensions, and whether it is progressing through time to move from a conceptual to an operational level. Results show that while the discussion is heavily focused on values, the operationalization of a value-based approach is still lacking, as it is not fully contextualized in relation to local heritage discourses and the dynamics of heritage governance. Results also show that many case studies applications are in ‘non-Western’ cities, thus opening the debate about the accountability of a value-based approach in contexts that tend to be dominated by groups with the most political power, and where conservation practices mainly focus on the mobilization of material heritage to foster its economic value. Nevertheless, the transition from international guidelines to contextualized local endeavours and policies remains a challenge to be solved.