Strumenti innovativi per la valorizzazione dei sistemi insediativi. Virtual Heritage Visualization nel progetto di Smart City per Santa Maria della Pietà a Roma

The concept of Smart City, as claimed in European Development Programs, exalts the social and historical heritage role inside the organic system of urban development factors. After having lost its original use as a Psychiatric Hospital, the early XX century settlement of Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome has been partially abandoned and transformed but it has maintained a strong identity and relationship with the territory around it and today it presents the basic factors for a smart development according to all six smart characters. Together with other public structures around it, both its material and immaterial heritage can become part of an interrelated and sustainable functional net to be used and transformed by citizens themselves through Information and Communication Technology. In the context of a general plan arranged by a Sapienza University three-year long multidisciplinar research, a central role is played by Virtual Heritage Visualisation, which offers potential solutions both to a wider sensitivity to visibile and invisible environmental relationships and to a participated development process, digitally grounding back the Smart City in the historical model of the civitas.