Heritage Community Resilience for sustainable and resilient human settlements

The value of cultural heritage for sustainable and resilient human settlements is recognized in international documents and agendas. These documents underline the importance of protecting and enhancing the identity values of the places to contribute both to the creation of a heritage community and to the strengthening of the community resilience. Small and medium-sized cities are today subjected to global and local challenges. The contribution of cultural heritage in facing these challenges is limited by its state of abandonment and degradation, the lack of investments in recovery and maintenance, the lack of often emigrated skills. The recovery of the built environment can be strategy aimed at preserving and enhancing the cultural heritage and improving the quality of life and at the same time privileged action for community involvement and for implementing new cooperative management models. The paper investigates the relationship between the increase in regeneration actions on cultural heritage, conducted by activating a network of multi-level partnerships, and the increase in social cohesion, awareness, innovation, reaction and recovery capacity. The research hypothesizes heritage community resilience indicators, i.e. performance indicators capable of gathering the link between the increase in relations between the local actors and the quality of urban regeneration actions.