Smart Heritage Strategy. A new intelligence for resilient historical centers

A Smart city is "a city where digital technology embedded across all city functions" (Smart Cities Council), originally born as a commercial adventure for new cities planned according to principles of livability, workability and sustainability, futuristic cathedrals in the desert (Masdar City, Abu Dhabi). The Smart ideology of the "over-planned" city has found its strength in the apocalyptic feeling that phenomena such as climate change and the supply of water and energy have been routed in the citizens through the mass media, and that the same multinational companies producing this new urban model promise to solve, through standardized actions anywhere in the world. Is this the future awaiting us? A city can be really defined Smart if it doesn’t lose its memory, if it doesn’t forget its past and if it uses the most advanced ICT to rebuild public spaces, offering actions and strategies built in adherence to the specific context, establishing a new civil conscience in human, social and economic relationships. Especially in Italy, the importance of adapting technologies to highly identifiable historical contexts, as places of historical memory and testimony of cultural heritage, is a central theme for the construction of the contemporary city, putting "best practices" into action on historical centers of large or small Italian cities, aimed at enhancement and revitalization, in opposition to the current phenomena of abandonment and gentrification that pervade these urban realities.