From tangible to intangible and return: hybrid tools for operationalizing historic urban landscape approach

UNESCO Recommendation on Historic Urban Landscape (2011) highlights the need for a rethink of the framework of tools for integrating conservation and sustainable development. In the same way, United Nations recognizes the centrality of human beings in development processes, synthesized in 17 Sustainable Development Goals, while New Urban Agenda refers them in the urban/rural space. Operationalizing HUL approach means to translate UN criteria into actions directed on cultural heritage and, in particular, on landscape with high cultural and natural values. The tools aimed to operationalizing HUL are in turn able to pursuit human wellbeing through cultural heritage. Many communities are enhanced from recognizing the values of their built environment, which as cultural heritage in turn become social glue. In a short time, these bottom-up processes produce effective results as relationships between people, community and place but in middle-long time they progressively blow out. Our research focuses on a hybrid approach to strengthen the social empowerment process and to make it long-lasting through the actions on built environment. An interdisciplinary and systemic approach aims to create physical and cultural conditions for a creative milieu. The integration of skills, knowledge, needs, values, visions of the different actors involved, brings economic, social and environmental impacts, that in turn are capable of circularizing relations between man, community and place, and activating a circular economy (Fusco Girard 2016). The project of built environment is a cultural project because, storing the intangible heritage of knowledge and adaptive capacity, becomes a source of innovation and a tool for managing the change. It not only promotes attachment to the place of daily life, but also produces connections between different communities. So the cultural diversity becomes a wealth for the community and an occasion to translate attentions of assets in actions that contribute to sustainable development, generating economic, social and cultural value.