Toward sustainable regeneration of historic endangered towns: strategies for increasing resilience

Abstract

Europe has numerous urban sites ranging from towns to hamlets with valuable heritage significance that are experiencing progressive and harmful abandon because of urbanization and globalization phenomena. Tangible heritage values (historic buildings and urban settings), as well as intangible ones (history, cultural and social values, and handcraft) contribute in preserving the site identity and maintaining the collective memory of local communities. The town architecture, together with its complex of symbols, conserves the place identity and characterizes the site historic development. Several reasons are responsible for this abandon process, such as unfavourable location, ending of industrial/commercial activities, natural disasters, lack of services, progressive aging of the local population, and social replacement. Globalization has a deep impact on community development, town improvement and economic growth; meanwhile it presents several vulnerability aspects that hinder the system adaptation capacity to react to environmental changing and to control citizens’ health and safety. The recent COVID-19 pandemic experience clearly demonstrated a transnational system weakness. Urbanization provides economic, social and cultural opportunities that can enhance life quality; on the other hand, sudden changes in urban density and growth can weaken the sense of place (the specific ‘genius loci’), the integrity of the social fabric, the traditional character of urban areas, and the identity of communities. Here we propose a new approach for contrasting the impoverishing of historic towns, which takes into consideration the different evolution of plant and animal organisms. While the animal organism functions as a unique one, in which single organs are strictly interdependent on each other, plants are modular organisms, where each single part functions independently on the others. In this way, single parts of the plant individual can be removed without threatening the organism survival. The regeneration strategy we propose tends to assimilate the functioning of small towns and hamlets to the plant organism, i.e. small communities independent on large and globalised societies and characterised by high resilience potential for contrasting unfavourable situations. Opposite to this model, globalisation represents centralised operative authorities that are responsible for the whole country, thus recalling the animal organism regulated by a single operation centre. Our model is based on a conscious and sustainable improvement of site resilience involving public administration and citizens by mitigating the impact of globalization process and re-discovering the cultural identity, history and traditions of urban areas, in other words, we propose to diffuse the “vital resources of the towns” at different levels and contests. Abandoned, neglected or disused villages and towns require restoration of their integrity in every respect: historic, artistic, architectural, social and cultural. This regeneration strategy should follow sustainable procedures, which requires the detailed knowledge of building material, of monuments and urban vegetation, as well as their decay phenomena in order to design an effective restoration program considering long-term conservation and durability. In order to realize a real regeneration, restoration should not be limited to building recovering and compliance, rather, it should aim at drawing a new cultural and social identity. This target represents a challenge that should take into account architectural aspects linked to: accessibility, historical and artistic context, as well as economic sustainability including agri-food excellence and specific traits of the territory. The rationale of this strategy is to maintain a balance between historical and landscape features, to avoid isolation of towns, and to promote their employment not only as tourist destination but also as living centres.