Premessa: edifici dimenticati e valori da ritrovare. Preface: Abandoned Buildings and Values to Rediscover.

The subject of enhancing built heritage requires contending with the particular characteristics of the Italian landscape, where abandoned buildings, available for reuse, are located on the edges of big cities or, frequently, in medium to small-sized municipalities; that is small in terms of the number of inhabitants, but big in terms of the dimensions of the problem. In these cases two opposing pressures are felt; on the one hand there is the spread of the abandonment phenomenon, which makes these municipalities settlements that are in turn abandoned, and on the other hand there is the phenomenon of pressure from tourism, which produces the loss of identity and quality of the built environment. The change in human activities has further fueled the processes of disuse of built heritage and land consumption. Reversing this trend requires a comprehensive strategy, founded on cultural, economic, social, and environmental changes capable of initiating a long-term process for the reconstruction of lost local identities and of the now weakened qualities of the natural and built environment. The strategies for enhancing built heritage must today be part of a major review of land-use planning policies. It is important to note, for example, that in the reference regulations used for governing the land, an essential principle such as that of excluding land consumption can still be difficult to find. A multi-scaled and multidimensional knowledge of the land is a strategic theme in analytical approaches to the study of landscape and community involvement is one of the innovations introduced only beginning in 2000 by the European Convention of Landscape. It is necessary to newly reinforce the quality of the landscape, mitigating the risks for the communities that inhabit them. Looking at the local built culture, it is possible to identify modalities of interaction between human and natural activities that are able to improve the safety conditions of the land and, at the same time, rebuild its identity. The possible uses for abandoned buildings must flow from the needs of the land, as expressed by local communities. Only in this way will it be possible to guarantee the future maintenance of the building, a construction activity that, in the pre-industrial culture to which many of these buildings belong, assumed a certain fondness for the building and involved a constant maintenance action made up of many small gestures. The selection of a new use for abandoned buildings constitutes, therefore, a crucial challenge, capable not only of affecting the conservation of existing constructions, but also of increasing their cultural, economic, and social value.