Enhancement of Public Real-Estate Assets and Cultural Heritage

We live in an era in which the demand for public goods is increasing with progressively ongoing physical and functional deterioration of existing goods, whether they are of absolute intrinsic value or provide secure social service (mobility infrastructure, social, commercial, leisure and culture equipment, etc.). In this scenario, future territorial redevelopment projects can be based on an open system of social attractors, composed of appropriately selected and enhanced public utility assets to promote their knowledge and use. Research has received incentives and resources to advance these projects. Identifying effective models for the recovery, financing, and shared management of heritage intended as a common good, which is often unused, is essential for transforming what is now recognized as a cost for society into productive investment, not only from economic but also social, cultural, and environmental points of view, from a circular perspective. We foresee cultural heritage as a potential element of a territorial system that continually redefines itself, and sustains and reproduces from within. The re-use of cultural heritage can be considered an essential contribution in the realization of a model of economy and city/circular territory, capable of preventing the waste of environmental (soils, materials, energy, etc.) and cultural resources (tangible and intangible heritage, knowledge, etc.), and capable of transforming waste into new economic, environmental, cultural, and social resources. The nature of public goods considered by the enhancement projects and the strong articulation that characterizes the redevelopment projects of a territory requires complex approaches. For public goods, enhancement projects involve determining the profile of greater social preference with respect to alternative options, to balance heterogeneous and often antagonistic factors. For this purpose, choices derived from the analysis of trade-offs of the type equity/efficiency, conservation/transformation, environment/economy, use/protection, public administration/civil society, public sector/private sector, and individual interest/collective interest are decisive, as are the decisions arising from new problems such as the participation of the community in decision-making processes and the prefiguration of shared project scenarios; the definition of compatible horizons with respect to short-, medium-, and long-term choices; or the systemization of various public goods and the interrelation of this system with the needs and supply in its territory. The complexity of the projects in the city, territory, or environment in question requires technical, scientific, and humanistic knowledge and skills that are capable of recomposing cognitive areas has progressively been separated and turned away by the hyperspecialism of recent years, producing often distorted and harmful effects. Today, the different areas of planning are called upon to overcome their self-reference and to seek interrelationships with the many types of knowledge involved to achieve a more advanced cognitive balance that responds to the needs of the contemporary world. Full awareness of having to operate in a cognitive quadrant is required based on conditions of uncertainty, risk, indeterminacy, instability, discontinuity, and a multiplicity of knowledge. Studies have shown that the scenario in which projects are implemented for the enhancement of public goods is problematic. The difficulties inherent in the prevision of the effects and impacts of the projects imply numerous conditions of risk and uncertainty. In this context, assessment can be used to determine the resolutive value of the existing problems as its cognitive system can help build or select implementation strategies of greater efficiency, equity, securit,y and social preferability. The concept of evaluation must be widely applied, including when and where to apply it to the areas to be investigated, the points of view to be considered, the type of judgment to be made, and the methods and references to be followed to express decisions and establish the extent of the phenomena considered. The first consideration is that the project implementation strategy should preidenitfy the contribution of the evaluation, not as a set of separate, occasional, and inorganic moments, but as a structured, logical, and interactive process applied to all phases of the implementation process, to all decision-making nodes, and to all alternative hypotheses. All decisions made through the evaluation process must maintain consistency. The second consideration is that the choices connected with outlining the feasible scenarios of complex projects, while continuing to use one-dimensional assessments—traditional and otherwise—should lead to a multidimensional assessment. The third consideration is that the implementation strategy of the project should include evaluation approaches capable of addressing the problems of distributive justice. The projects undertaken for the enhancement of public goods involve a wide range of interests, different and often conflicting, which must be considered if the basic objective is to achieve the most balanced design solution. Therefore, the configuration of the project scenarios should arise from collective visions and concerted actions, for which social participation and the active role of civil society are becoming increasingly decisive. This situation urges the use of evaluations conducted with consideration of several points of view, expressed by the project stakeholders, including public, private, and civil society, all this with the aims of having knowledge of the effects and impacts produced by the project and of providing, if necessary, their redistribution with shared criteria. Starting from these reflections, the contributions presented in this book outline rich and varied experiences and innovative tools on the enhancement of public and cultural real estate assets in support of a model of sustainable development and capable of promoting re-use of cultural heritage in European cities and cultural landscapes with circular economy logic as a model of sustainable development. From this point of view, cultural capital is the driver of the regeneration process on local, urban, or metropolitan scales, in which the transversal interconnections between the production cycles of the adaptive re-use of the available heritage, both in the adaptation and in the management phase, configure a circular process of multidimensional production of value.