Cultural Heritage, Urban Planning and the Smart City

The conservation of historic buildings and historic centres over recent years has become fully encompassed in the planning of built-up areas and their management following climate changes. The approach of the world of restoration, in the international context even before the Italian one, with the Toledo declaration "on integrated urban regeneration and its strategic potential for a smarter, more sustainable and socially inclusive urban development" introduces, for urban transformations in general (historical centres and otherwise), the theme of sustainability. From this viewpoint it envisages, as a primary objective, a real "green, ecological or environmental" requalification of the city through interventions within the main categories of sustainability: mobility, energy efficiency, use of sources of renewable energy, urban metabolism (waste, water, territory, etc.) and natural environment. With this the concept of a "resilient city" is also introduced, which can adapt through progressive transformations to situations of change which may not be predictable, behaviour that the historical city has always been able to express. Urban planning, on the other hand, has increasingly focused on analyses oriented towards the taxonomic description of social/economic and perceptive parameters, connected with human behaviour, mobility and the characterisation of the consumption of resources, in terms of quantity even before quality, to inform the city design process which, for ancient fabrics, mainly affects the public space also in its social dimension. An exact definition of the term "smart city" is still essentially elusive, since we can attribute three dimensions to the term: a) that of a virtual city, evolved based on digital networks and web networks; b) that of a physical construction determined by urban planning based on infrastructural innovation, which in the case of historic centres implies regeneration that stimulates and sometimes changes the existing fabric; c) that of a political and social/economic project guided by a dynamic process that provides new behaviour and requirements of the city communities that orient the future planning of cities also through participation in their management. This paper is a preliminary research into the connections between these three dimensions applied to the specific case of the fabric of ancient cities with the aim of obtaining a scientific theory and methodology to apply to the regeneration of European historical centres. The SmartPolis project at the BHLab of the ITABC of the CNR is an initiative which intends to provide a transdisciplinary approach between various research networks (natural sciences, socio-economics sciences and humanities, technological disciplines, digital infrastructures) which are united in order to improve the design, liveability and understanding of urban environment and high historical/cultural performance levels.