SMART HERITAGE AS REGENERATION OF HISTORIC MEDITERRANEAN CITIES

In the last few years a renewed interest in the regional context of Mediterranean basin has been displayed. Environmental and economical issues are among those most frequently treated topics. In this cultural context, the urban conformation of historic Mediterranean areas is allowing a development of urban identity concept, heading toward a multicentre structure of the city, as result of projects for reducing CO2 emissions, strengthening of social cohesion and environmental sustainability. In the physiognomy of the Mediterranean city, a system consisting of a few elements, can be read by different urban and cultural characteristics as each city has an excessive variety and fragmentation which makes difficult the identification of a historic Mediterranean model. Some of the Mediterranean elements are: stratification of road layouts and buildings, splitting of neighbourhoods, recognition of urban spaces, overlapping and mixture of architectural types. Among the factors that determine a particular interest in the stratification of urban centres, with a vision of smart regeneration for sustainable future city, we can also identify the influence of sociological and cultural field. Thinking about urban Mediterranean context means deepening features and formal differences of morphological settlement and urban design of historic city, looking to the matters that allow investigating the original conformation of the historical city, evolution and construction techniques that over time have defined urban areas. Talking about regeneration of historic spaces, the idea of regeneration through buildings retrofit puts together a framework of actions that aims at the recovery of places identity.
The proposed research aims to the identification of factors, within the historic areas, that constitute urban heritage, proposing a way to restore the functions of urban historicized and layered spaces and a new definition of smart urban design, inside the historic centre, by the relationships among elements towards a smart city. The goal is to advance some urban regeneration hypothesis through the restatement of their identity and the implementation of new technologies towards new ways of functioning that historic centres in the Mediterranean city should have. […]