Una carta di valutazione per le strategie di rigenerazione del territorio storico

The main purpose of the present work is to develop a methodological proposal for the evaluation of development policies and regeneration strategies for small historical towns and minor historical cities, while reconsidering the conceptual categories which define their territorial role. More specifically, the contribution of this investigation is to identify a flexible evaluation process and consequently to build an operational tool – the Evaluation Set of Indicators. The Evaluation Set is a tool to investigate how actions, programs and projects are implemented and the effects they produce; it aims at contributing directly to the continuous improvement of "territorial performances" and at supporting the possible rescheduling of interventions by government and local authorities. The investigation has been supported by both an historical and descriptive approach (analysis of the literature, legislation and the most significant experiences, not only with respect to regeneration strategies for historical towns, but also with respect to evaluation methodologies) and an empirical case study analysis; indeed the application of the Evaluation Set has been tested through two case studies (Regione Toscana and Regione Sardegna), used as benchmarks for the methodological proposal. Since the early ‘60s, Italian academic debate about architectural and heritage conservation of historic towns and cities has been extremely lively and it has produced a number of in-depth researches. Indeed, historic towns and cities are the larger part of Italian settlements and they are proper to this Country: they are part of the historic character of Italy, they tell the story of its unique development and give a sense of place, continuity and cultural identity. However, over the last few years, rapid economic changes and accelerated growth have caused a widespread abandonment and decay of historic towns: they have lost their primary functions and their territorial viability has faded away. Consequently, academic studies have pointed out the need to oppose these phenomena of abandonment and decay and they have emphasized the crucial contribution of regeneration strategies. Indeed, although extensive academic research has explored the dynamics of architectural and heritage conservation of historic cities, much less and more recent research has investigated the effectiveness of regeneration strategies for minor historical towns and, above all, the related evaluation issue. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to investigate potential and effectiveness of regeneration strategies for minor historic towns while proposing an evaluation model. The work is structured in three parts. TITOLO TESI The first part is devoted to the brief description of the theoretical background required to better understand the “question of historical towns”. The literature review and the analysis of the disciplinary debate in the Italian context have been faced in order to propose a definition as clear as possible of historical towns; a thorough analysis has been devoted to determine the proper meaning of minor historical settlements, in order to reconsider their territorial implications while establishing the limits of this investigation. On the other hand, a classification scheme of minor historical towns has been proposed – in order to clarify the phenomenology of historic settlements, functional to the selection of possible case studies. The second part critically describes reasons and circumstances of the recent transition from conservation to regeneration of historical towns and settlements, describing the balance between seclusion and slow development. The following analysis of opportunities, meanings and problems of the evaluation process aims at outlining how it is complementary to development projects and regeneration strategies and how it may be used in a constructive way. The literature review, the investigation of evaluation criteria, methodology and terminology, the analysis of national and international sets of indicators, aim at reducing the lack of uniqueness and the deep variety of meanings with respect to evaluation itself. In the third part, the Evaluation Set is described and tested through selected case studies – Regione Toscana and Regione Sardegna. More specifically, this part describes the general framework of the Evaluation Set, its structure, the evaluation methods and the judging criteria applied. The critical description of the selected indicators is discussed depending on five different “capitals” (human, social, infrastructural, physical and manufacturing capitals) – each of them is described in order to clarify contents and meanings, to review the literature, to explain the selection of the varied indicators derived from national and international dataset. Finally, the results of work have been described – not only with respect to the results of the evaluation of the selected case studies, but also with regard to the effectiveness of the Evaluation Set, the weaknesses emerged during the application, the compliance of the indicators to specific local situations.