Search

Climate change, natural disasters, and human activity subject cultural heritage to several shocks and disturbances. The interest in risk reduction and management has increased significantly over the last decades, including for cultural assets. To protect and value them for future generations, the current issue is the increasing of their resilience. This research work is related to the European project ResCult - Increasing Resilience of Cultural Heritage: A Supporting Decision Tool for the Safeguarding of Cultural Assets . This paper aims on the one hand to illustrate the state of the art on risk assessment in the European context, highlighting its fragmentation, and on the other hand, to determine the economic value expressed by the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice (Italy) through the Travel Cost Method (TCM), as one of the components value to support risk assessment of Cultural Heritage. This study considers how the suggested strategy may be applied on a European level.

The current urban challenge is enhancing, maintaining and improving the urban resilience of cities. However, how can cities as complex and adaptive systems be or become resilient? There are specific capacities/qualities that urban systems should have to enhance and maintain their resilience (e.g. redundancy, resourceful, robustness, etc.). Different studies list and describe these capacities in literature, underling also to which urban dimension (e.g. economy, society) they are referred. However, there is a lack of quantitative assessment of these capacities. As well, the analysis of which degree different urban components can enhance and maintain these capacities. Based on the socio-ecological approach of urban resilience, this study proposes the application of multicriteria analysis (MCA) to evaluate which degree the different urban components can support the enhancement and the maintenance of the specific urban resilience capacities. The proposed framework is an indicators-based method that includes a multidimensional set of urban resilience indicators and the set of urban resilience capacities. In detail, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) has been selected according to its ability to consider the mutual interconnections of the evaluation elements. Moreover, a multidisciplinary panel of experts is asked to weigh the importance of the different urban components in enriching the different urban resilience qualities. The final result is a set of priorities that assess the relative importance of each urban component about a specific urban resilience capacity. The illustrated application is a preliminary pilot case study that quantifies the possibility of quantitatively assessing the urban resilience capacities. In detail, this application refers to a more complex and comprehensive evaluation approach that combines MCA with the System Dynamics Approach (SDM). Therefore, the next step of this research will concern the aggregation and the employment of the obtained priorities in the abovementioned approach to correlate the urban resilience performance with the urban capacities.

Current urban agenda is interested in developing urban strategies to enhance urban resilience for cities. This paper examines the concept of urban resilience applied in the context of urban planning with specific attention to which are the capacities that make urban systems resilient. The knowledge and the understanding of these capacities are fundamental to set up suitable strategies. However, only few frameworks consider urban resilience and its capacity within the complexity of urban system. Through an in-depth literature review, this paper aims at providing a methodological framework both to recognize these capacities and analyze which are the main factors that mainly contribute to the achievement of these ability. The paper illustrates the first step of the application of a System Dynamics approach to analyze the redundancy capacity in order to define which are the key variables to enhance this capacity and also to determine which can be the impacts on the urban systems as a whole of the redundancy.

The concept of sustainability is widely seen as fundamental to set up urban and territorial transformations. Sustainable development is a multidimensional and multi-perspective process that deals with the environmental, economic, and social dimensions, with the aim to find a balance among these. Despite this growing attention to sustainability the social perspective has been the less explored of these dimensions and only recently it is receiving consideration due the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that aim at creating sustainable and inclusive cities and communities. In the SDGs, specific attention is focused on the improvement of the quality of life of inhabitants through specific actions dedicated to the valorization of cultural resources, to the protection of the environment, and also to promote the involvement of the local communities in setting policies and programs. The final objective is defining projects based on the social needs shared by the communities. This paper aims at exploring the social sustainability related to urban regeneration processes with particular attention to social cohesion and community engagement. Six different urban regeneration strategies, developed for the regeneration of an urban area located in Northern Italy and based on social housing interventions, have been evaluated in accordance with their social impacts on the stakeholders involved. The paper proposes a multi-methodological approach based on the combination of the stakeholder analysis with the NAIADE (Novel Approach to Imprecise Assessment and Decision Environments) methodology, a particular type of Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation. The stakeholder analysis has been applied to identify the actors to involve in the evaluation, whereas the NAIADE methodology has been implemented for the selection of the most preferable strategy. This method allowed the assessment of the different strategies through the comparison and the mediation between the technical and the social rankings, thus considering the stakeholder preferences in the final evaluation. The final result is coherent with the initial purpose and it demonstrates that the inclusion of the stakeholder is fundamental for the achievement of a consensus solution.