Designing the future of ancient city centers: adaptive technologies for an active protection

The built heritage constitutes a substantial element of European identity. Historic textures, monumental complexes and isolated buildings in the real estate market, can become new dynamos of our markets, enabling member countries to maintain a strong position in the global economy. At a time of economic crisis, when heritage conservation loses priority in European investment policies, scientific research is called upon to act as a stimulus to communities, not only protecting physical assets, but also preserving practices, histories, and environments, supporting the sense of continuity and identity. After several decades of increased funding, built heritage management faces nowadays, a new threat: governments from the Atlantic to the Aegean are slashing the budgets of their culture as they struggle to re-balance their public finances and contain their debts. The penetration of a technological thought to new ways to acquire, to manage, to exchange the knowledge, constitutes the scene of reference in which delineating the applicative potentialities of innovation to mitigate the vulnerability of settlements. With the aim of granting the lengthening of settlements’ life cycles, in line with theoretical assumptions and previous research conducted within the PhD, the paper introduces a reflection on the possible variations on the concept of innovation, in the recovery of ancient historical centers. The focus of the paper can be identified in the effort of outlining a condition of synergy between scientific fields that have been developing, in the past decades, in separated ways, in order to promote a radical change for the context within which European agencies, enterprises and communities, are going to operate to hand down identities.