Not Only for Tourists: The Historic Urban Landscape as Infrastructure for Livable Contemporary Cities

This paper aims to contrast the idea that the future of historic centres in today contemporary cities is to become ‘thematic parks’ oriented to a touristic urban economy. This idea is the epigonic legacy of a banal functionalism, the limits of which were highlighted since the Sixties of the last century by the criticisms against the schematic and poor application – i.e., the abuse – of the zoning town-planning techniques, and a reductive notion of living space. To conceive and set up the contemporary city as a patchwork of thematic parks and highly specialised urban parts will produce the effects of a relevant loss of its real habitability conditions. On the contrary, historic centres can play a meaningful, plural and complex role as ‘urbanity infrastructures’ in the cities of today.