Lessons to Learn and Challenges to Address in Resilient Historic Towns

Abstract

The concept of resilient cities, including the environmental, social and economic dimensions of the urban sustainability against both slow and fast moving changes over long time horizons, is very distinctive when applied to historic towns. For built heritage, beyond the conventional goals, namely wellbeing and safety of citizens, functionality and reliability of services and infrastructures, effectiveness of management and development strategies, as well as availability of economic resources under disruptions or threads, a further aspect should be considered. It concerns the preservation and promotion of the original value and identity of the places by the capability to prevent, adjust and overcome the obsolescence at different levels – physical, technological, normative and functional. In this regard, two approaches are required: on the one hand, the critical understanding of the inherent qualities that made the historic towns resilient to past transformations – lessons to learn; on the other hand, the identification of strategies that could enhance such a resilient behaviour in the future against an exceptionally precipitous evolution of the outer alteration factors – challenges to address. In the light of the above-mentioned issues, the paper is going to develop some insights on the aspects that most influence the resilience of the historic towns, with specific attention toward the Mediterranean climate of South Italy. Firstly, some performance-based categories are identified, connected to the inherent resilience of the built heritage – e.g. relationships with the surroundings, employment of resources, natural regulation of microclimate, aggregation schemes and uses – as well as to the requirements of contemporary resilience – e.g. safety, accessibility, fruition, and efficiency. Thus, some qualitative and quantitative indicators are introduced and discussed, based on the validation by representative case studies, as a support toward the development of a resilience metrics for historic towns.