Governing the Historical City: Transformation is Necessary to Counteract the Further Waste of Extra-Urban Land

Abstract

The safeguarding of building heritage identity is motivated by three important attributes that are: the complexity of its physical-architectural characteristics; the richness of its articulation; and the socio-economic, environmental, and landscape interdependencies inherent to it. However, the ancient built environment must also measure itself against an increasingly pressing necessity for adjustment to the needs of work and living environments. Furthermore, it is challenged to do so in such a way that reduces the wasteful use of extra-urban land by redirecting urban transformations back within the existing city [15]. The map of intervenibility on heritage, proposed in this work, thus represents a technical response, assisted by multivariate geostatistics and Geographic Information Systems. It responds to the necessity to reach a synthesis that – after examination of the effects of urban history on contemporary places – identifies its virtues and contradictions. Thus, the map suggests the degree and modes of building interventions through a multidimensional classification of real estate by cultural value, visual field, urban morphology/typology, structural quality, and form of open spaces.