Thesis title: Città storica-patrimoniale e cambiamento climatico Dialettica tra tutela e innovazione per l’adattamento del patrimonio culturale
The current climate crisis affects all countries without distinction and although there is no single solution to address it, the international scientific community indicates two main intervention measures: mitigation, i.e. the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, of a quantitative nature and to be implemented at a global level, and adaptation, which aims to reduce the vulnerability of urban and socio-economic systems, of a qualitative nature and to be implemented at a local level (European Commission, 2015). In 2015, as part of the Paris Agreement following the XXI Conference of the Parties (COP21), both the International sustainable strategy with the 17 sustainable development goals (sdgs) and the Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction, issued in Japan, were approved. Both of these documents deal with establishing the lines of work and objectives for managing climate change, addressing natural disasters and achieving a reduction in carbon emissions.
Exposure to sudden meteorological events such as recurrent short and intense rainfall, sudden changes in humidity and temperature, as well as the greater frequency of extreme events such as tornadoes and violent winds, require adapting especially cities, the most populated places, to climate change. In this context, the critical infrastructure of cultural heritage, despite being a particularly vulnerable sector, is still little explored: these are places, given their dense and compact structure, particularly sensitive, subject to numerous restrictions and interactions between the exposed sectors involving different types of capital: social, economic, cultural and environmental, a situation further aggravated by the anthropic pressure of tourism that adds to the permanent population the temporary and ever-growing one of visitors.
The present thesis aims to explore adaptation actions for an integrated approach between urban planning and ecology (Oliva, 1992), that is, between urban design and protection and innovation strategies for a process of adaptation of cultural heritage to climate change.
Currently, at an operational level, the various areas follow different tracks: on the one hand, there are strategic documents including the energy and climate action plans (Paesc) that consider cultural heritage in a general way, and on the other, local plans (often still in the traditional form of the general regulatory plan) that regulate urban functions and transformations according to a static vision of the historic city often still limited to the homogenization of a zoning that confines it to the "zone A" of the plans and to a weakly holistic approach.
Starting from the gap between conservation and transformation of the historic territory, from the need for practical solutions and tools for integrating adaptation to climate change into ordinary management of the territory, new perspectives are explored in which to converge both the protection process and adaptation actions.
In the thesis, the historic heritage city is primarily investigated with a focus on the Italian and Spanish cities declared world heritage whose historic center coincides with the Unesco core zone. This preferential look at the two countries is linked to two main reasons: the first of a cultural nature, in fact Italy and Spain present common typological-morphological and historical-evolutionary characteristics; the second of a geographical-environmental nature, in fact the two countries, both in the Mediterranean area, present very similar situations and conditions of climate change (heat island, tropical nights, short and intense rains with flooding). The aim of the thesis is to identify a methodology for adapting historic cities to extreme rains and heat islands, or to decline, for the different settlement fabrics, the actions for improving the climatic-environmental performance of public spaces in a coherent and harmonious way with the actions for protecting the historical-cultural values that underlie them (Romano, 2023).
The work therefore focuses on the prefiguration of interventions that enhance the climate resilience of cultural heritage that is still little investigated and that requires, due to its historical, cultural and disciplinary characteristics, urgent and targeted actions, that is, sensitive to the urban object to which they are addressed.