Urban values-centred regeneration in the perspective of the circular economy model.

As the world continues to urbanize, sustainable development challenges will be more and more concentrated in cities and they increasingly require identifying and implementing new development models and strategies to be able to conserve the identity in a general context of homogenization/standardization. In this perspective, cultural heritage plays an important role also for enhancing quality of life, well-being and health conditions. The circular economy model can be implemented in the cities in order to achieve sustainable development. It offers a great opportunity to increase urban productivity, and to date, there are some good practices of circularization of processes at different scales in which the implementation of circular processes has produced benefits. In the circular approach, resources are reused, recycled, recovered, regenerated and shared. Among resources, cultural heritage/landscape should be considered. Cultural heritage conservation/valorization and circular economy are intertwined: cultural heritage conservation can be implemented through circular economy, and circular economy can be implemented through cultural heritage conservation/valorization. Assuming the unifying approach of the landscape as a ‘prism’, proposed through the historic urban landscape (HUL) approach, in which all different perspectives converge with respect to which it is possible to interpret the city system, this contribution intends to propose some strategies for values-centred regeneration of the city based on the circular economy model. In particular, the focus is on the operational strategy of cultural heritage adaptive reuse, highlighting the relationship between ‘intrinsic value’ and use values. In this perspective, the evaluation activity plays a fundamental role in identifying the multidimensional productivity of the different project alternatives and related impacts, beyond the reductive perspective of the tourism approach (e.g. in terms of the archaeological/museum park).