Accessibilità, sostenibilità e valorizzazione delle mura e delle città murate / Accessibility, sustainability and enhancement of city walls and walled cities

The relationship between the need for safeguarding and the need for fruitful and economic enhancement through appropriate and sustainable uses of the cultural heritage presents a series of criticalities. In particular, the persistence, especially in the Italian context, of an antagonistic approach between conservation and enhancement of the heritage, which tends to disregard the importance of fruition as an essential lever for the social and cultural re-appropriation of cultural assets. In this context, walled cities, present in all European countries, are an interesting and emblematic case study for research and experimentation; in fact, they express a significant strategic potential for urban regeneration, both in their physical dimension of space and public services, and the intangible aspects of identity and social cohesion. Within the latter, the implementation of effective and extensive accessibility to places for all users, are always expressed in terms of indissoluble integration between material usability, multisensory perception and cultural intelligibility. This paper will focus precisely on this aspect, in relation to the practices of reutilization and re-functionalization of walled cities and city walls, and enhancement processes in which the usability of the place constitutes a precondition for the actual economic sustainability of its conservation.