Sustainability and cultural heritage: axiom or oxymoron?

Sustainability has become a global priority among the environmental, social and economic challenges facing us urban planners in the coming decades. The perspective of culture and the cultural heritage's role in triggering sustainable policies is one that, more than any other, requires an informed, integrated and interscalar approach. Yet, we still encounter many difficulties in associating the two terms within effective and lasting policies and strategies. We are still too often associated with a constrained view of cultural heritage that reconciles poorly with sustainability and development. If, instead, we address the issue of sustainability from the perspective of a complex and conscious process of building a social and cultural identity, then cultural heritage becomes a fundamental component in the definition of valorisation and development strategies that relate heritage itself and communities to the territory and its inevitable physical and functional transformations. From this viewpoint, sustainability and cultural heritage can represent a deductive and reinforcing axiom of the same principle. Culture is thus asserted as a tool not only for economic development, but above all for promoting dialogue, respect for diversity, social inclusion and consequently cohesion in response to the need to ‘strengthen efforts to protect and preserve the world's cultural and natural heritage’. In urban territories in constant transformation, cultural heritage becomes the element of continuity between the past and the future: it represents continuity to the past, and at the same time, the identity heritage to be passed on to future generations, in a perspective in which transformation becomes continuous evolution. The contribution intends to explore this theme through the presentation of sustainable and inclusive experiences of regeneration and reuse of cultural heritage in Italy. These include the cases of Rome (Integrated Park of the Aurelian Walls), Bologna (City of Water) and Padua (Park of the Walls).