The need to better care for the urban landscape as a cultural, material and regenerative resource is urgent and inevitable. From a planning and design perspective, national heritage characterisation tools currently constitute an explicit point of departure for attributing value to existing urban landscapes, which informs decisions about physical transformations. This qualitative and integrative review focuses on international recommendations and on the ability of national characterisation tools to address ‘relational character’, meaning the interconnectedness of architecture with its situated environment, people and place, atmosphere and the sensory. Although international heritage institutions pledge to include relational character, in our search of state-of-the-art and exploratory approaches to relational character both nationally and regionally, we find that few such tools incorporate relational character, and those that do provide different emphases. We conclude that heritage characterisation tools are not yet sufficiently developed to address existing urban landscapes from a relational perspective.