Tools for Regeneration of the Urban Landscape. Social Enterprise as a Link between People and Landscape

Urban Landscape constitutes a social, cultural and economic asset defined by a historical overlapping of values produced by cultures, tradition and experiences recognizable in their diversity and that have occurred overtime. It represents a key resource for economic development, social cohesion, and liveability in urban areas - and it is an element that can counter unchecked development that critically affects community values and can negatively affect urban quality of life. The Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) Approach "identifies, assesses, protects and manages" urban areas, considering the mutual relation among their physical shapes, spatial organisation, links, natural characters, social, economic and cultural values, variety of stakeholders and different levels of action (UNESCO, 2011). In order to respond to chapter IV of the UNESCO recommendation - asking for tools to make operative this approach - this paper identifies and analyses tools for investigating the social and economic dimensions, dealing with themes such as urban governance and new models of innovative entrepreneurship that encourage and support the protection of the urban landscape and its sustainable development. The methodological approach developed starting from a definition of objectives and indicators derived from the UNESCO recommendation, represents a comparative analysis of some socio-economic tools by means of a performance matrix. The first result of this on-going work is the identification of the social enterprise as an effective socio-economic tool in support of the regeneration of the urban landscape, capable of responding in a satisfactory way to the requests of UNESCO within the wider framework of sustainable development, principally thanks to its capacity to construct new relationships among people as well as between people and the urban landscape.