A Creative Approach for the Architectural Technology: Using the ExtrArtis Model to Regenerate the Built Environment

Abstract

In the context of cultural heritage reuse, creative businesses can play the role of activators of sustainable transition processes in the built environment. The exercise of the functions by creative enterprises can improve actions of regeneration of local identity, values, and built heritage. The aim is to demonstrate that creative enterprises are strategic industries able to activate actions of custody and cultural heritage valorization, proposing themselves on the territory as culture-led regeneration tools. The methodology discusses integrated strategies that intervene in the systemic criticalities of cities to regenerate tangible and intangible cultural heritage through multidimensional, multi-actor, and multicriteria approaches, matching community and the built environment. The result concerns the identification of a system of actor issues and creative criteria using the ExtrArtis© model, a transformative driver that constitutes a creative class as the guardian of the genius loci.

1. Introduction

The European Union, as a key resource in global competition, recognizes cultural heritage’s ability to affect sustainable local development, interconnecting the actions of the conservation of cultural/natural resources with the productive circuits of flows and values [1]. As part of the 17th General Assembly of ICOMOS, dedicated to the theme of “Heritage as an Engine of Development”, the importance of adopting integrated transformation/conservation tools for the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage was discussed [2]. Instances of regeneration push technological design towards solutions that can face the cultural, social, environmental, and economic costs related to the processes of degradation and abandonment [3]. The behavior of the materials, techniques, and functions of the built environment contribute to the possibility of preserving the cultural value of heritage, therefore influencing the costs related to maintenance, management, and operation. The willingness to invest, with the same value, increases with the reduction in costs. To this is added the social cost of abandonment—and possible irreversible loss of assets—such that it must be included in the choice of investment [4]. In this scenario, and downstream of the COVID-19 pandemic period, the investment gap in cultural heritage and landscape regeneration can be addressed through creative models of regeneration. These look to creative companies as activators of processes of the sustainable transformation of territories, as the exercise of their functions affects market requirements as a response to the needs of widespread users. This allows the creative company to build flexible models to achieve positivity on individual and collective well-being [5], increasing the employment offer, the protection of the roots of cultural heritage communities, and the sustainable use of local resources [6]. In the latter sense, cultural heritage is considered an ambivalent resource for local sustainable development: on the one hand, there is an increase in sites recognized as cultural heritage; on the other, there are the vulnerabilities that this increase causes by linking to the increase costs for maintenance/functional reuse [7]. This pushes research towards new scenarios of governance and regeneration capable of mediating between the available public resources and the interests of private actors focused on a short return time. The growing risk that follows is the decay of cultural heritage, which can be mitigated through creative companies’ operations regarding the regeneration of local identity, cultural and artistic values, and built heritage of the contexts in which they operate. In this sense, cultural heritage can play a role as a driver of regeneration and sustainable urban/territorial development from an environmental, social, cultural, and economic point of view [8]. The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage becomes the tool to circulate the flow of raw materials, energy, cultural capital, and social capital while determining the protection of collective identity and economic and human development. The contribution looks at adaptive reuse as a concrete example of circularity that goes beyond the linear economic paradigm “take–make–dispose”, based on the illusory unlimited availability of resources. It evolves towards the transition of a new circular economic paradigm involving materials, technologies, the natural and built environment, society, and the business community [9]. Among the different meanings of creative regeneration, it is necessary to interpret it in at different scales and multidimensional way, looking not only at the single product but also at the size of the city—which is understood as a living system and contains within it an omnivorous attitude practiced by settlement and production systems towards materials and territory [10]. This position takes on a negative meaning of circularity such that when the city can no longer consume land or resources, it begins to consume itself. It is not only land consumption but also an increase in the processes of degradation, abandonment, and obsolescence with a loss capacity of two square meters per second [11]. The built environment contains within itself the cultural heritage whose consumption represents the loss of non-renewable primary resources. Acting on cultural heritage also has a significant environmental value on a community scale: as can be seen from the latest report on the circular economy by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the latter has a double impact [12]. The first relates to the loss of assets affecting the construction sector, which accounts for 36% of European waste; the second relates to tourist attractiveness producing 38% of European emissions [13]. Therefore, there is a need to push the culture industry towards creative regeneration strategies capable of integrating the imperatives of the Architectural Technology with the rebalancing of an urban metabolism, in which the adaptive reuse of the built environment assumes the principles of sustainability, orienting itself towards the ability to reuse the different forms of capital (not only economic but also social, natural, and built), promoting new synergies between different actors of the territory and the built environment with cultural value. The enhancement of cultural heritage also affects the well-being of communities based on the greater or lesser predisposition to understand the urgency of the actions carried out on the built environment and on the set of values of which it is the guardian. This is significant if we compare it in countries, such as Italy, where tangible and intangible cultural heritage is recognized as one of the primary resources of the national economy. The process of the reuse of private buildings of cultural value in accommodation is witnessed by several countries, including Italy, where there are 183,000 structures considered to be private cultural heritage that have changed their use to comply with management and maintenance costs [14]. With a view to large-scale creative regeneration, it is necessary to rethink the city by looking at cultural heritage reuse as a paradigm of urban change. This cultural heritage is the result of a balanced mixture of material and intangible values that constitute one of the main resources for the development of the territories in which they exist. Material culture is the product of the creative action that a community imprints on the available resources. Intangible culture is the value that derives from these operations and that, in a circular perspective, in turn, produces a materiality that affects territorial redevelopment strategies [5]. The intention of also wanting to give an economic value to a resource that in itself does not have one has the purpose of strengthening the original value of the resource, obtaining the double advantage of making it communicable and incorporated into decisions. Therefore, it can be pursued through the preservation of economic values equal to the environmental/cultural/artistic value [15], as it is integrated and multidimensional because it is connected to a concept of utility that is also expanded. This no longer concerns only direct users, but also the simultaneous satisfaction of other human needs through the provision of flows of services [16].

The current research questions whether there is an effective and efficient way to use the actions of creative enterprises in cultural heritage reuse operations and the regeneration of the built environment. The research aims to establish a model that can contribute to the new directions of European regeneration of the built environment. Therefore, it traces this possibility within the testing of the ExtrArtis© model, tested from May 2022 to May 2023 and winner of the world-scale selection announced by the Horizon 2020 CLIC Startup competition for innovative models of circular reuse of the built environment.

The paper consists of an introductory part, discussing the themes of cultural and creative regeneration of the built environment. Section 2 is dedicated to how the inclusion of the theme of innovation is treated in the literature, and a subsequent one is dedicated to integrated strategies that intervene on the systemic criticalities of the built environment to regenerate tangible and intangible cultural heritage using multidimensional, multi-actor and multicriteria approaches [17]. Section 3 concerns the methodological approach, based on comparative evaluation tools such as multivalue matrices, using the analysis of the actors of the creative process and the transformations of the built environment. Section 4 concerns the methodological tool used to demonstrate what is supposed by the research question. Section 5 discusses the results of the ExtrArtis© model, the outcome with the related actor issues, and creative criteria (Figure 1).

2. Building a Theoretical Background for a Creative Regeneration

To show how creative enterprises can represent regeneration empowerment by inducing actions to reuse the built environment, it is necessary to return to a theoretical background articulated in several sections. The first section clarifies the type of regeneration that a creative company can exert in the built environment. The second section concerns the framing of the type of regeneration identified on both a European and an Italian scale, the latter being the country of experimentation and validation of the proposed model. The third explains the potential ways that this type of regeneration can be implemented at different scales in both the built environment and the communities that inhabit it.

2.1. Culture and Creative Companies as a Motor for Built Heritage Regeneration and Economic Vitality

Creative enterprises are strategic industries that, through their work, activate actions of custody and the enhancement of cultural heritage [17]. This movement takes place on both a tangible and intangible level, proposing itself in the territory as an instrument of regeneration. Creative enterprises act in these models of culturally based regeneration, transversally sharing the principle that culture plays a significant role in the processes of the sustainable growth of industries, territories, and citizens [18]. At the same time, the companies themselves support the specificity of the context in which they act and develop by assessing in a systemic way the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of the places where they derive and generate profit [19]. In particular, companies that act creatively in preserving the constructive landscape identity of a given place call themselves CCI—culture and creative industries—as a motor for urban regeneration and economic vitality [20]. This type of instrument supports the practice of the regeneration of cities in decline, counteracting the critical issues characterizing unsustainable production models, the impoverishment of identity caused by globalization, and deindustrialization operations due to the disappearance of private cultural heritage [21]. This regeneration places culture as a transformative driver, highlighting the need to establish a creative class [22] formed by expert knowledge but hybridized with common knowledge: administrators, authorities, professionals, entrepreneurs, innovators, research centers, universities, cultural operators, territorial associations, and new groups of citizens as guardians of the genius loci. They are all functional actors for the development of creative enterprises and, at the same time, for the sustainable governance of the city in which they operate [23]. Involving all these categories of city-makers, it is possible to develop new integrated strategies that intervene in the systemic criticalities of cities to regenerate tangible and intangible cultural heritage using multidimensional, multi-actor, and multicriteria methodologies. The study of creative companies is essential for triggering reflections on the need to follow interdependent models of governance and businesses while being careful to combine the economic–financial aspects with those of the processes of reuse of the built environment. This would make it possible to trace and pursue a multidimensional horizon of common sustainable development. The hybridization of knowledge, models, and values of creative companies aims to drive the transformations of cultural heritage. The work of creative enterprise intervenes in the multiple relationships characterizing the processes of culture-driven regeneration of common heritage in an iterative way to creatively reinterpret the requirements necessary for the establishment of valid bonds to respond to the needs of the market and society. Three different types of cultural-based regeneration intervention models can coexist: the culture-led regeneration model, in which culture is considered to be the catalyst of the regeneration process. The second one is the cultural regeneration model, in which cultural activities are integrated with recovery actions (environmental, social, economic, and architectural). The third one is the culture and regeneration model, in which the cultural aspect represents an additional and final attribute of the regeneration process [24]. From its earliest stages, creative enterprise is responsible for identifying the benefits, costs, obstacles, and opportunities for business development, starting from the enabling factors, which it has in order to build favorable scenarios and involve decisive actors [25]. The latter, ranging from investors to users, and from producers to control bodies, must be involved in the process of change in order to organize careful and active management over time of the institutional, environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions. Creative enterprise, once its scenarios, tools, and actors have been calibrated, must evaluate the most appropriate regeneration strategies, identifying the specific latent criticalities as an opportunity for the renewal of production policies. The creativity used to transform waste into a resource translates into market innovation, indicating which of the identified potentials contribute to the construction of functional changes, and, therefore, preferably, the regeneration of common cultural heritage [4]. This mission identifies tangible and intangible transformations of cultural heritage, determining cultural, physical, economic, environmental, institutional, functional, social, and value impacts consistent with the concerns of collective benefit. This mixture allows creative companies to support local administrations in planned investments in the cultural and artistic field and to involve local communities in a development process based on organizational models with an economic and social background. Through this integration, it is possible to promote sustainable models of regeneration that hybridize top-down and bottom-up approaches within complex exchange and dialogue operations mediated by the common objective of reaping benefits and investing in common cultural heritage [25]. Creative companies can build cultural landscapes attentive to an inclusive and collaborative vision as well as multi-level governance of interconnected and interdependent values. Innovation driven by creative enterprises pushes regeneration processes towards socially sustainable, economically adequate, and culturally evolutionary development strategies. For this reason, this type of company can also be recognized as heritage-led thanks to the ability to dispose of creativity, being at the same time itself a creative device plastically adaptable to the functional dynamics of the built environment and its sub-systemic, multidimensional, and multiscalar dimensions [26]. They offer new opportunities for growth and custody through innovation activities and the protection of cultural heritage, revealing the need to produce new values to reactivate and creatively integrate the pre-existing ones.

2.2. From Europe to Italy towards a Culture-Led Regeneration of the Built Environment

In this scenario, the European debate looks at cultural heritage as an indispensable resource for the economic growth of cities, aimed at the progress and enhancement of the tourist offer, the financial market, and the quality of the built environment [27]. In the contextualization of cultural industrial work, creative enterprises are called to act according to the latest regulations of the European Parliament in relation to the establishment of the European Year of Cultural Heritage [28] and the New European Bauhaus [29]. The first document highlights the priority role of cultural heritage within the cooperation projects related to the guidelines of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [30] to link the processes of governance and territorial management to the settlement system. In the second document, launched on 18 January 2021 by the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, the birth of a sustainable and inclusive project of the European Union is foreseen for a revolution that starts from culture. The New Bauhaus inherits the previous mission and launches the new one through the slogan “beautiful, sustainable, together” [31]. This project is inspired by the Bauhaus, literally the house of building, i.e., the school of architecture, art, and design founded in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius and guided by the principles of beauty, functionality, and collaboration. The cultural movement managed to reconcile artistic creation with industrial production to meet the needs of a new society. The New European Bauhaus will consist of a creative and interdisciplinary space to design the ways of life of the future by combining sustainability, social inclusion, and art and culture [32]. The New European Bauhaus is tasked with driving sustainable transformations of the built environment by giving a cultural dimension to the Green Deal. This has the potential to trigger the conditions for a new urban era of planning and development based on cooperation, active communication between actors, and the territory, sharing knowledge received from experiments and verifiable sustainable strategic approaches, attributing to the transitions of the territory, and of the communities that inhabit it, a fair and sustainable ethical dimension, which is a mirror of the appropriate integration of new technological frontiers and transformative solutions. The operations of actor involvement will have to evolve from co-design processes to prototypes inspiring the growth of the company and the quality of governance that it experiences [28]. The New Bauhaus realizes the paradigm of change by acting as an expression of new mindsets capable of combining sustainability, inclusion, and aesthetics. The cohesion of processes, values, and territories addresses the critical issues from a multiscalar perspective, from the size of the village to that of the metropolis, even to the region or the nation in transition. This offers a great opportunity to verify the impacts by intervening in the development of processes and redesigning the order of transformative priorities to envisage multiple directions of creativity [28]. To be in line with the regulatory landscape outlined by the European Union, cultural enterprises will have to bring the themes of the Green Deal (the fight against climate change, zero emissions, and ecological transition) closer to communities. This happens in order to imagine, together with European citizens, public and private spaces at the crossroads between art, culture, social inclusion, and science and technology. Creative enterprise will therefore have to link its innovation to creativity in the approaches to the regeneration of the built environment, in evaluation studies of social inclusion, in the construction of sustainable and circular economic models, and in the drafting of culture-led regulatory frameworks. To combine what has been described, creative companies will have to rely on complex procedures and be attentive to the co-design, launch, and dissemination phases. Specifically, the co-design aims at a participatory brainstorming in which it is possible to integrate ideas of expert knowledge with practices of common knowledge that are handed down in order to identify in the already existing realities good practices that interpret European principles [28]. The launch phase concerns the experimentation of pilot ideas related to geographically and culturally referenced experiential missions with the support of multi-actor and multiscalar (regional–national–European) partnerships to contribute to the construction of a common European consciousness. Dissemination represents the dissemination phase of the good-practice models created to amplify the results obtained, strengthening networks built beyond European borders. These networks, considered to be a single mesh with the name of the Enterprise Europe Network, represent a space to support small and medium-sized enterprises in the world, providing free integrated services to promote internationalization, innovation, and research, as well as the dissemination of timely information to access European funding, programs, and opportunities reserved for creative companies [33]. For creative companies, participating and expanding the network means enjoying and sharing different services related to:

• innovation support (the analysis of innovation management and improvement skills, consultancy on the management of intellectual and industrial property, support for technology transfer/open innovation, patent brokerage, partner research for technological cooperation, and enhancement of research results);
• development of partnerships (research for technological/productive/commercial cooperation, identification of partners for participation in European projects, transnational brokerage events, technological/commercial cooperation missions, and international fairs);
• growth and development in foreign markets (information on European policies and legislation, single market and international standards, strategy for foreign markets, support for startups/spin-offs and new entrepreneurship, assistance to facilitate access to finance, contacts with Italian and international public/private investors).

In this mission, creative companies are involved in Enhancing Innovation Management Capacities for the strengthening of innovation management capacities by measuring a company’s performance and positioning in terms of innovation, development, and implementation of an action plan aimed at bringing out positive aspects and overcoming critical issues [34]. This mainly characterizes the structure of a creative enterprise and its innovation management system, which provides a systemic approach to integrate innovativeness in all levels of an organization to seize and create opportunities for the development of new creative solutions, systems, products, and services.

These European directives are transposed by the Italian government with legislative decrees, directing creative companies towards platforms and networks of cultural exchange that aim to build hubs of different professionalism ranging from startup entrepreneurs to digital developers, from cultural managers to workers in the world of the arts. Currently, the Italian models of creative hubs are recognized by the European network [35]. The heterogeneity of these professionals is evident in the differentiation of the specializations of their figures, in the organizational structure to which they belong, in the experimentation sector, in the services offered, or in the products they create. At the same time, these figures can be related through the approach that unites them and that is based on the participation of the community in the creative process through laboratory actions of cooperation or co-design. The involvement of users in the processes of creative enterprises makes it possible to combine creative cultural production with social empowerment in the form of circular subsidiarity, where communities, free market bodies, and institutions mutually support the process of regeneration of cultural heritage [36]. Such circular subsidiarity develops when the economic and managerial insufficiency of public institutions in administering cultural heritage is filled by the investment of a private entrepreneur. The latter draws creativity from the expression of the needs of the community, borrowing the tools for enhancing projects from the cooperation and collaboration of communities in the processes that affect cultural heritage. In this way, through the participation of the heritage community, the creative entrepreneur plays an essential role in supporting the extension of the life cycle of cultural heritage, ensuring its functional efficiency over time and its testimony for future generations. Italy, in particular, boasts the legislative proposal Ascani C.835/2018 on the discipline and promotion of cultural and creative enterprises, Opinion of the Commissions I Constitutional Affairs, II Justice, V Budget and Treasury, VI Finance, IX Transport, X Productive activities (ex article 73, paragraph 1-bis, of the regulation), XIV EU Policies and the Parliamentary Commission for regional issues. The legislative proposal regulates the requirements of cultural and creative enterprises to support innovative forms of youth entrepreneurship promoted to enhance the cultural offering in a multiscalar and transterritorial key. This law ratifies the ability of creative companies both to regenerate the territories in which it operates and to regenerate the identity of even the most marginal Italian areas. This reading has still flowed into the drafting of the National Strategy for the internal areas of the country. It declines the strategic lines of intervention based on the European Structural Funds of the 2014–2020 programming cycle, defined in the framework of the Partnership Agreement, and provides support for sustainable territorial competitiveness to counteract, in the medium term, demographic decline. The strategy has meant that over 1000 municipalities in inland areas were invested in about 70 funded projects in the cultural, tourism, and agri-food sectors aimed at their development. To accompany these projects of regeneration and cultural empowerment, Italy boasts further innovative measures such as the initiative Valore Paese—Paths and Paths—for the reactivation of degraded accommodation facilities and the social bonus of the Third Sector Organizations Code (Legislative Decree 117/2017) for the involvement and tax relief of non-profit companies in the recovery processes of abandoned or confiscated public buildings. To support the Italian link between the value recognized in the built environment and creative cultural tools with a social background, the Association of Foundations and Savings Banks (ACRI) supports the development of startups under 35 aimed at cultural, creative, and artistic fruition. The innovativeness of the Italian legislative framework highlights the methods of the national strategy according to which culture is used as a vehicle capable of generating simultaneously both social and economic values. The potential that companies and the government recognize in culture lies in the ability of the latter to introduce new levels of well-being and to define models of participation based on knowledge and on the integration of processes of coordination of the systemic dimensions of the sites to be recovered [37]. Culture is considered an essential tool for the development of regenerative approaches germane to the rebalancing of the different relationships between the components of reality. Culture makes it possible to involve several aspects and dimensions at the same time to transform pre-existing critical issues into synergistic development opportunities. Creative companies base their growth models on the attractive quality of the culture of integrating external resources with internal ones, creatively reinterpreting the development model to which they refer. This gravitation of resources, people, and finances that culture can trigger determines an increase in local pre-existing competitiveness, an increase in social cohesion and active participation, and an enhancement of territorial entrepreneurial skills. These synergies can characterize development models of high competence and specialization, which look at the importance of participation as an educational and training process of the community. The latter, by acquiring knowledge/competence, can be enabled to take part in decision-making debates from which they were previously precluded for such shortcomings. Creative enterprise uses culture as a driver to enable local resources (tangible and intangible) to trigger processes of integration of skills, increasing the awareness of the community to induce it to affection and care for cultural heritage [38]. This form of the development and enhancement of cultural heritage occurs when the community recognizes in the latter an intrinsic shared value independent of use. In this common vision of cultural heritage, it is possible to preserve existing values and generate new shared ones, germane to the needs of the time [39]. The action of creative enterprises becomes the engine of physical, cultural, economic, and social transformations of cultural heritage, generating experiments that offer new models of cooperation as well as innovative forms of organizational governance to structure value-production chains [40]. This process inextricably brings together the economic, cultural, and social aspects and the institutional, community, and entrepreneurial figures to contribute to the regeneration and creative innovation of cultural heritage.

2.3. How Can Creative Enterprises Improve the Built Environment and Its Communities?

To strengthen the identity of territories and protect the identity diversity of local communities, creative companies must operate sustainably, recognizing the built environment as a place of sedimentation of urban values, and linking itself to the identity of resident inhabitants. This connection derives from the impossibility of separating the actions of citizens and the phenomena of neglect, abandonment, degradation, and sometimes vandalism suffered by cultural heritage. Social degradation is always a manifestation of the physical degradation of the built environment, which is why it is necessary to act on the regeneration of the performance of the buildings to induce users to support new values. From this perspective, social cohesion builds sustainable scenarios that envisage the re-appropriation of places and their cultural improvement. The heritage community becomes the vehicle that creative companies listen to in order to activate exercises of civic and cultural responsibility aimed at strengthening the identity values of the built environment. Creative enterprise acts simultaneously on private investment spaces and on public ones, reconnecting lost links between open places of use and closed ones of historical and cultural context, characterized by their own characteristics. Creative enterprises aim to generate new places of collective life in communities using, within their model of action, the search for the expression of diversity, the well-being of the community, and economic growth. In particular, creative companies play a particularly significant role in an era in which a crisis was produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, because in line with territorial development policies, they are considered to be potential tools for implementing experimental measures and pilot actions that restore quality to the built environment. The potential of the service of the creative enterprise in the redevelopment and maintenance actions of the consolidated city operates a paradigmatic change in the material culture of architectural design. Art opens up new participatory forms of community empowerment, stimulating collective actions to preserve and enhance cultural heritage. Creative enterprise can produce cognitive frameworks of the territorial capital recognized by the community, which, when exposed to the culture of recovery and maintenance, can be educated to rediscover its identity sites. Creative enterprise induces experimental governance with variable geometry for which the actions of the reuse of built heritage aim to build over time voluntary care for the regeneration of the spaces of identity fruition. Sometimes, the built environment is characterized as a resource shared by the community regardless of the order of ownership, being an integral part of the collective memory of the inhabitants. Creative enterprises using artistic stimulation, make a shift on the acting level. Creative enterprise looks at the technological, environmental, and, above all, social impact as the difference changes in society generated in the long term. This determines that we no longer look only at cultural heritage but at the system of relationships that the actors of the process carry out on it. Creative enterprise triggers participatory processes characterized by value and operational aspects. The action starts from satisfying the need for knowledge, safety, and use of cultural heritage, evolves in the sense of belonging to the site that it recognizes as an integral part of its community, and induces care towards the built environment resulting, sometimes, in forms of self-realization for the management of the asset itself. The appropriateness of the actions of creative enterprises in the reuse of the built environment is measured through the satisfaction of the needs of communities with respect to the expected performance of the built environment. Creative enterprise, offering a system of actions on the built environment and integrated services necessary for the design, management, and overall construction of spaces, acts in three dimensions: housing, work, and infrastructure. In the case of the housing dimension, creative enterprise makes use of technical knowledge for the planning and management of the built environment, identifying the location and management of the artistic tools that can induce employment towards forms of collective maintenance. In the working dimension, creative enterprise affects the construction of equipment for cultural heritage and its urban surroundings, determining employment offers that affect the flow and the settlement load of the sites. In the infrastructural dimension, creative enterprise aims to convert waste into resources, using art as an attractive but also educational tool for maintenance management attentive to the environment and the impacts of the actions it triggers on the territory. These three dimensions align with the creative approach investigated by creative enterprise to stimulate the community dimension of custody through participatory reuse processes based on the involvement and education in the responsibility of the built environment. This process generates both a strengthening of existing values and the production of new ones, arising from the dynamics of the interaction between the built environment and the user. The system of bonds that is generated is strengthened with the cooperation produced by artistic creativity. The latter becomes an engine of cohesion that is identified in the artistic production and in the co-design of interventions aimed at the integration of art within the settlement systems and the opportunity to oversee the built environment. To sanction these processes, creative enterprise acts on the intrinsic link between the cultural identity of a community, the built environment it inhabits, and the culture of which it is a manifestation. This, in turn, influences the state and maintenance of the built environment, triggering circular self-sustainable processes that favor the use of materials and technologies appropriate to the contexts, and also encouraging the development of local production. Creative enterprise, using artistic tools, can therefore affect the processes of management and maintenance of the built environment, establishing collaboration agreements between citizens, associations, administrators, companies, institutions, researchers, and actors in the territory. Creative enterprise produces culture through artistic experimentation that allows both the transmission of local expertise and traditions and the development of the community to benefit from cultural heritage. Creativity gives back to future generations the previous values of past communities, contributing to the collective empowerment of identity heritage at different scales (local and European). Therefore, the objectives of creative enterprises regarding actions practiced in the built environment align with the European sustainability guidelines of heritage enhancement as drivers of inclusive urban growth and enablers of social cohesion and equity. Creative companies anticipate the need to associate the preservation of the heritage of contemporary cities with social and economic development, promoting the recognition of their dynamic character and functional diversity. The creative company looks at cultural heritage as a resource whose values are protected and increased over time through cohesive operations of reuse and participatory maintenance. This allows the reduction of the loss of heritage and the impact it has on the environment, and prolongs its existence. To achieve this goal, creative companies push their models of territorial action towards intrinsic meanings of circular sustainability, focusing on the ability of the community to attribute a complex social value to the built environment in its identity dimension by converting degradation into potential. Creative companies act, therefore, on communities, territories, and governance processes of the built environment by reactivating the link between the community and places. The innovativeness of the creative enterprise lies in attributing to the user the ability to influence and act in the entire process of reuse, alongside expert knowledge and participating in the cognitive process, inspection, and diagnosis, but also implementation and monitoring through supervision linked to the social–educational exercise. Artistic tools can sensitize users to a more inclusive and typical vision of the community-built custom within the higher-order addresses of creative enterprises.

3. An Iterative Innovation Process: A New Methodology for Merging Creative Companies and Built-Environment Regeneration

To allow clear restitution of the methodological process of making the model, the methodology has been divided into two sections. The first inherent to the approach used by creative companies is to build an idea capable of inducing virtuous operations of transformation and conservation of the built environment. The second section starts from the outcomes of the explanation of the first one to introduce how the creative idea implements these actions for the satisfaction of the needs of the stakeholders through to the performance enhancement of the subsystems of the built environment. These two methodological sections make it possible to clarify how creative companies can affect the dynamics of the Architectural Technology in terms of regeneration.

3.1. Methods and Analysis for Innovation and Culture-Led Regeneration

Creative enterprise takes the form of an interrelated and interdependent system of elements of a complex organization, aimed at establishing innovation policies and regeneration processes germane to the territory to achieve the objectives set. The extent of innovation attributed to creative enterprise is realized to bring and redistribute value. Innovation can manifest itself in the form of a product, service, process, organization, model (work or operational), method (marketing or organizational), practice (management or monitoring), or by their combination. Creative companies, therefore, must follow the seven UNI-CEN/TS 16555 models defined by European Innovation Management Standards [33]. The first of these standards refers to the innovation management system, which provides a general picture of the stages of the innovation process; strategic intelligence management, which deals with the management of the company information system and innovation thinking, concerns the construction of structured and rapid approaches for the generation of innovative solutions for the market. The core focuses on intellectual property management, which deals with the management of intellectual property. Collaboration management manages collaborative innovation and creativity management, which concerns strategies to promote the creativity of the company. In particular, innovation management assessment is useful to address an assessment of organizational innovation [34]. The methodology, starting from the aforementioned models and deepening the ISO related to innovation management system and guidance, is based on tools and methods for the partnership and guidance of strategic intelligence. These norms and standards support creative enterprises in building the circular model of the overall innovation management process [34]. Such a model can be represented as iterative, circular, and incremental, using the entrepreneurial creative idea as input to the management process and refining it with the know-how to re-enter its output within the process to improve it. The idea for an efficient regeneration process of the built environment is elaborated through five main incubation phases: the management of the incubation of the idea, the development of projects, the protection and exploitation of creative capital, the introduction into the market, and the achievement of innovation results. Following the elaboration of the idea in these phases, it is possible to obtain innovative outputs, which if evaluated, integrated, and reintroduced into the process, can improve the initial idea, grafting as input to support the creative enterprise in its mission of success. There are generally two evaluation tools for the implementation of the idea behind the creative enterprise: the IMP3rove Assessment Evaluation and the Innovation Health Check. These tools allow the obtaining of an evaluation report based on a broad and articulated comparison with many companies in an extremely short time in terms of overall duration and commitment required of the company. The IMP3rove Assessment Evaluation is a tool of the European Innovation Management Academy and is based on a holistic approach to assessing innovation and performance management capacity as a key factor for competitiveness [41]. With this tool, creative companies can compare their innovation and performance management skills with the average scores of thousands of direct and indirect competitors. By contrast, the Innovation Health Check is a structured assessment through a verbal protocol with the creative company about the key areas that influence the management of successful innovation within society [42]. To be valid, a wide participation of subjects belonging to different departments/sectors is necessary to allow a transversal evaluation of the culture of innovation, and understanding of the business, strategy, structure, capacity, resources, and processes. The model of the overall innovation management process can be verified by the PDCA cycle (Plan–Do–Check–Act) to improve the entire management system, stressing the principles of circularity and growth (also defined in 2020 as the Innovation Management System). This tool shall be structured to ensure that innovation initiatives are adequately supported, managed, and resourced. In addition, the PDCA cycle aims to ensure that opportunities and risks are identified and addressed by the organization of the creative enterprise itself. The PDCA cycle can be applied to the innovation management system as a whole or in some of its parts, being informed and directed by the context of the organization and its direction. This recognizes, therefore, the creative enterprise as a driver of innovation and the ability to realize value. From the point of view of the sustainability of an organization, it is a priority to distinguish innovative activity from inventive activity. This distinction can only be established through the possibility of creating value by first identifying, understanding, and meeting the expectations of stakeholders [43]. This determines a mutual strengthening between cultural capital and social capital, generating the continuity of benefits among all the actors of the process and at the same time enhancing cultural heritage through the shared actions of co-creation and co-management at different scales [44]. Creative enterprises rediscover, in the reworking of the sense of belonging and sharing of a community to a place, in the consolidation of collective identity, and in social cohesion, resources in which to invest [45]. These resources, although intangible, take the form of cultural capital [46], which can produce tangible transformations, guiding and inducing in the territory-integrated processes of regeneration, adaptive reuse, and redevelopment of the built environment. By breaking down the latter into different sub-systemic dimensions, it is possible to attribute a key role to the creative enterprise in the reinterpretation of the stimuli and needs of the time, appropriately prompting the multidimensional links between society, culture, environment, and the economy [47]. In this multifactorial vision, the material and immaterial regeneration of cultural heritage becomes an opportunity to regenerate local identity, producing new urban transformations that implement the environmental, social, and economic opportunities of the common heritage resource [48]. Therefore, the innovation that is attributed to creative enterprise must be the bearer of the ability to generate both financial and non-financial value, manifesting itself in the form of a creative business network and creative cultural hub [48]. In a circular perspective, creative enterprise links culture to its founding idea and invests productively in cultural heritage, therefore assuming an essential role in transforming the cost of regeneration, management, and maintenance of this resource into a personal and collective profit (environmental, economic, social, and cultural) [49]. Creative enterprise, which looks at cultural heritage as a resource shared by all the actors in the process, must be the bearer of virtuous models that counteract the loss or irreversible damage of this value. Cultural heritage is often the subject of degradation processes linked both to exploitation for touristification and abandonment and due to financial costs and technical–administrative constraints of regeneration. Creative enterprise recognizes in the investment of cultural heritage the potential to mitigate the territorial imbalances to which it belongs and, at the same time, to guarantee an autopoietic trend [49]. Touristification, and the related changes in urban forms and functions due to the growth of tourism [50], represent a threat to the preservation of cultural heritage values, causing an often functional and technological incompatibility and the degradation of the intrinsic value of heritage, which, consequently, leads to the loss of use value over time. The inappropriate or technologically incompatible use response to the functions required by contemporary needs causes the degradation of the built environment, prompting a social, economic, and cultural cost for a community deprived of its right to the city, and an enforced move [51]. This means that aiming at creative production allows the territory in which you invest to constantly redefine itself to sustain itself through the creative reuse of local material culture of private interest [52]. Cultural tourism points the research towards the regeneration of private cultural heritage that offers a creative redevelopment of the management, transformative, and economic structure of real estate. In particular, if we consider tourism as a social, cultural, and economic phenomenon that represents the third-largest socio–economic activity in the EU [53], having supported, until 2019, 9–10% of the world’s direct [54] and indirect [55] GDP, it can transform cultural values into economic and social values [56]. Borrowing this connotation on a methodological level, it is possible to trace models of regeneration capable of using creativity, linking them to tourism as an instrumental element of the value of cultural heritage [56].

3.2. ExtrArtis© Model as Methodological Improvement of Culture-Led Regeneration

The methodology discusses integrated strategies that intervene in the systemic criticalities of cities to regenerate tangible and intangible cultural heritage using multidimensional, multi-actor, and multicriteria approaches. The methodological approach makes use of comparative evaluation tools such as multivalued matrices [45], using the analysis of the actors of the creative process and the transformations of the built environment. The identification of the categories of actors is based on the influence and interest that the individual stakeholder/decision-maker assumes within experiments calibrated in the literature [26]. Within these figures, those who can benefit the built environment and its users, while at the same time benefiting themselves from these creative forms of territorial regeneration, can be further identified. Once the actors of the process have been established, it is possible to build an actor–issues matrix, linking the processes of participation to the forms of sub-systemic analysis of the built environment [4]. This methodological movement can take place in every category of stakeholder/decision-maker, and therefore it is possible to trace individual improvement and the development of a sub-systemic sphere of the built environment typical of the Architectural Technology [26]. Therefore, within the matrix of issues, it is possible to compare the individual sphere to the collective one declined in cultural development, economic development, social development, environmental development, and technological development. This will allow the matrix to return the actor issues as a result of its construction [45]. These issues then flow into the construction of a second matrix from which it is possible to identify creative regeneration criteria. This is created through the systemic comparison between the actor issues, the result of the previous matrix, and the system of elements encoded by architectural technology [4]. By relating this to the discretization of a virtuous cultural model and project such as that of ExtrArtis©, it is possible to advance in the comparison between the actor issue and constraints on transformation (interpreted as the potential for transformation). This direction of the construction of the matrix to consider relating the process to the performance requirements reveals the possibility of realigning the conditions of the spatial, temporal, and value dimension of the built environment. The outcome of the array returns a system of creative criteria within which concrete action addresses are identified. The possession of identified issues and actions opens the research landscape to a possible subsequent evolution of research aimed at identifying impact indicators.

4. Materials: Artists’ Residence Practices as Creative Companies’ Tools for Culture-Led Regeneration

The practice of artist residency is a tool for creative companies to strengthen the career of artists, and, at the same time, also to facilitate the transformation of the settlement systems in which they occur. Artistic action can be used to activate participation by producing a common space in which people take responsibility for their choices and generate a community space through the process in which they are involved [17]. The quality of living is given by integrated factors that balance the different dimensions of the built environment to be confronted with the design of art. Through such an approach, the architect, the artist, and the citizen synergistically become builders of living spaces with regeneration practices that take on a formative value for new generations. There emerges a need to develop the integration of education, research, and cultural design in institutions of higher arts education, pushing toward the activation of territorial relationships [17]. Co-design at the urban scale generates community networks, which can become training sites for a new quality of public space. Creative making is both the engine and product of these networks, in which the coming together of the social, cultural, and productive context pushes the artist toward the search for meaning and creative acting that experiments with new ways of producing and situating oneself [17].

The practice of artist residency acts on the distribution of values and flows catalyzing the links from the local to the global. The artist, during this type of practice, acts as a binder between different material cultures, favoring the exchange and cultural evolution of communities and territories. The artist can represent a bridge between the identity of the host community and the cooperation of the culture of the country of origin. This openness allows a wide spectrum of activities, spaces, and resources that can be experimented with collectively over time through interdisciplinary productions between communities and disciplines and sector knowledge. Artist residency practice identifies cultural, economic, social, and environmental partnerships as an emerging theme aimed toward the growing tendency to identify methods of collaboration and participation. The art itself that is produced by the experience of the artist residency and its impacts on the territory are the result of partnerships and interdisciplinary exchanges that generate new territorial relationships on learning and sharing. The resulting artistic production leads to the creation of new social and societal networks capable of affirming cultural and creative distinctiveness. Although artist residencies strengthen the arts and culture of cities and regions by improving the cultural offer for citizens and tourists, they regenerate and influence social change by acting as catalysts for creative companies in the regeneration of the built environment. The involvement of communities links social change to the creation of safe and dialoguing settlement systems, called “creative cities” by Richard Florida [22]. Therefore, the practice of artist residency involves the need to concretely verify the impacts of the creative process that are triggered at different scales and with the different actors of the culture-led regeneration process. The potential benefits comprise five significant areas: the first relates to the professional development of the artist, the second to the host residence building and its organization, the third to local communities, the fourth to the creative companies that derive from it, and, finally, the fifth to territorial governance that welcomes the experience at different scales.

The benefit to the artist lies in the possibility of developing ideas and connections through new themes, materials, and creative forms, determined by the opportunity to exhibit and contaminate oneself with local values. From a cultural point of view, they allow interaction with other professional and community figures for the development of connections that bring innovative ideas. From an economic point of view, the artist uses the economic resources provided to learn new techniques and to trigger financing flows, starting from the rewards, which is a new form of economic support. From the social point of view, the artist develops operational and managerial skills deriving from the insertion and/or introduction to a social network of belonging. From an environmental point of view, the productive artistic flexibility that is required to meet the needs of the community and the requirements of the institutions must be targeted at the lowest environmental impact by expanding the artist’s creativity. From a technological point of view, the artist must aim for the adaptation of work performance with respect to the material–constructive, perceptual–cultural, and morphological–dimensional elements of the residence. The sub-systemic reading of the benefits determines the identification of an issue aimed at creating a bridge experience between material culture and the instances of time.

The benefit to residence host organizations lies in the possibility of interacting with artistic knowledge and knowledge that can contribute to the improvement of the property. From a cultural point of view, they allow interaction with different cultural art forms that can support the flow of international tourist exchange reciprocally. Hosting artists from different cultural and professional backgrounds offers the guest the opportunity to gather experiences and develop lasting relationships in Europe and internationally. From an economic point of view, the profit generated by the greater tourist influx determines a new offering and the inclusion of the residence in new diffusion channels. This enriches the offer and the local cultural scene, increasing the reputation of the host structure and the local one, giving rise to international ties. From a social point of view, the development and opening of the residence, usually inaccessible, to communities provides a new way for staff and users to learn about new forms of investment and/or tourist learning. From an environmental point of view, the identification of the abilities of the welcomed artist to develop local networks of collaboration acts flexibly on the residence and its built and natural environment. The mobility of artists through artist residency programs is necessary to stimulate a richer European cultural ecology that will contribute to a more balanced climate and less massive tourism. From a technological point of view, the negotiation between artistic action and the use of cultural techniques or languages can respond to the critical issues of the residence through the reinterpretation of community needs. The systemic reading of the benefits determines the identification of an issue aimed at creating a link between art, the built environment, and the actors of the territory.

The benefit to the local community lies in improving the quality of life of users and the local community. This is because residency can help develop awareness, knowledge, and understanding among different groups in society, improving the public sphere and creating a renewed sense of trust and sense of place. From a cultural point of view, collective interaction, with artists and high types of stakeholders, can create new networks of participation. From an economic point of view, this generates the economic attractiveness of new forms of national investment and profit for local traders. From the social point of view, the community lives through the residence the development of social, educational, and creative capacities for the rediscovery and strengthening of identity. From an environmental point of view, the practice induces in the community the strengthening of ties and relationships between the local population, interaction with the environment, and trust in sustainable governance processes of the creative base. From the technological point of view, this determines the co-creation of actor-participation processes based on the needs of the community, expanded as project requirements for the performance expected from the regeneration of the experimentation space. A sub-systemic reading of the benefits determines the identification of an issue aimed at creating a community in self-realization, a process based on recognizing oneself as part of a built environment as a testimony of tangible and intangible values.

The benefit of creative enterprises lies in the transformation of the territory, developing an agenda of community and artistic growth. This objective is outlined in the mission and objectives of creative enterprises, i.e., to support the exchange of cultural knowledge by offering a creative form of development. From a cultural point of view, creative enterprise triggers a multi-actor and interscalar advancement of the public–private matrix. From an economic point of view, creative enterprise affects the development of international networks of culture, flows, values, and knowledge. They can contribute to cultural diplomacy, which can have an impact on broader relations in trade and political relations. From a social point of view, they follow the satisfaction of the needs of the actors of the territory through creative forms of participation. Funders with a specific social mission can extend their reach and their intercultural competence, exchange, and dialogue. From an environmental point of view, they enjoy the flexibility of an artistic model that transforms waste into resources. From a technological point of view, creative enterprises carry out an intercultural negotiation of shared management techniques for the maintenance of the built environment. A sub-systemic reading of the benefits determines the identification of an issue aimed at creating context-aware and community-based models (Figure 2).

5. Results and Discussion: ExtrArtis, Artists Residencies for Creative Economy©

ExtrArtis© is a best practice elaborated to test the methodological approach. It is a cultural model and creative project for built-environment regeneration, conceived by a creative company on the hypothesis that the identity of a settlement system is closely connected to the values and skills of the tourist offering in its territory.

The model identifies creativity and culture as the new drivers of economic growth, occupational, cultural, and exchange. The model has improved and evolved over the years of research since ExtrArtis© was selected by the CLIC Startup Competition–Horizon 2020 as one of the best circular models leveraging investments in cultural heritage adaptive reuse. It also is a national finalist project of the ITWIIN AWARD 2022, an award sponsored by the Prime Minister’s Office as an invention of remarkable innovation in the STEAM sectors of the contemporary landscape.

Specifically, ExtrArtis© responds with creativity, on the one hand to the crisis in the tourism sector caused by the COVID-19 emergency and, on the other, to the desire to enhance cultural heritage as a resource and opportunity for dialogue in the sense of belonging to a common European space, an objective promoted by the European Union and the Council of Europe during 2018 as part of the Year of Cultural Heritage at the Bucharest Declaration on 16 April 2019.

The ExtrArtis© model captures the critical issues of the receptive economic infrastructure as an opportunity to renew its tourist offer, aiming at a qualitative vision, not only quantitative, of the profit methods that determine transformations of the built environment. This starts from the fixed points of interpreting cultural tourism in corporate solutions as a creative engine capable of generating value through artistic approaches and mitigating the dynamics of the gentrification and touristification of contemporary cities. The slogan “Artists Residencies for Creative Economy” briefly describes the function of the homonymous ExtrArtis© platform in opening the market of non-hotel accommodation facilities with a consolidated historical–artistic identity to the art world through the practice of artist residencies. ExtrArtis© is a useful service both to territories that do not have historicized tourism and to those that, despite having a solid tourist tradition, can, in this way, cultivate new horizons. The model uses creativity to bring hosts closer to artists. This allows the former the possibility of a training experience in a network of properties recognized as a collective cultural heritage; at the same time, it allows the latter to turn towards slow tourism strategies with higher quality and a less massive offering. The ExtrArtis© model, therefore, is consistent with the aspects of the city-region-centered approach for the regeneration of cultural capital. On the one hand, ExtrArtis© opens to the community a common cultural built heritage usually accessible to the public, but which becomes such through the sharing of the artistic experience; on the other, it allows an entrepreneur to improve the quality of tourism by participating in the creative process. The work of art created by the artist activates a process on a territorial scale and, through its circulation, can create an economic–cultural network that benefits artists, entrepreneurs, and communities. This determines a strategy with a positive impact on social cohesion, stimulating a quality tourist offer that is massive and sustainable. The creation of a network of residencies and works produced can increase economic and cultural wealth by generating widespread value in the territory in which it operates. The cultural quality improves by associating the tourist market with an artistic reality attentive to the specificities of the territory.

ExtrArtis© aims to create a territorial network that exploits the transversal strength of the artistic tool to activate large-scale economic connections. The nodes of the network are the emergencies of cultural heritage and the built environment of interest and the connection between the poles is established by the flow of artists and guests that ExtrArtis© allows (Figure 3).

These networks of relationships are enriched by multi-actor collaborations that aim to increase the awareness and knowledge of artistic capital by the local community. The innovativeness lies in reinterpreting the key role of art by transforming tourist heritage into a self-sustainable system, according to a human-centered meaning; art exploits its self-poietic capacity able to stimulate synergies and symbiosis through circular relationships that relate man–art–tourism, community–culture–economy, and participation–dissemination–cash flow. This process triggers benefits not only in the interests of individuals but also of the territory and the resident community by increasing the quality of tourism and consolidating the material culture of the place. ExtrArtis© triggers benefits by involving the public through educational, cultural, and entertainment services for residents who build an artistic heritage community through participatory, collaborative, and cooperative approaches to the enhancement of the built environment. The choice to combine the contemporary needs of cultural tourism with the expected performance of the built environment of interest offers a new model for community heritage.

Most properties of historical and artistic value are privately owned, and many of them have been transformed into tourist facilities to cover the cost of the management and maintenance of unique buildings. ExtrArtis© allows the extension of the use of property to the local community that recognizes it as part of the values of its cultural identity, and at the same time allows property to grow in value and quality in terms of tourist offer. In particular, ExtrArtis© maps significant residences on a European scale, aiming to reactivate a network of buildings that have welcomed the first experiences of contemporary tourism in the form of a modern Grand Tour. This allows ExtrArtis© to act as a model that acts in the goal of offering a new way of regenerating cultural heritage through a form of tourism based on the long-term development perspective centered on man. The creativity applied to the processes of regeneration of the built environment, with reference to the functional tourist reuse of artifacts of cultural value, must be appropriately oriented to the expression of the intrinsic values of the places. ExtrArtis© intervenes by producing a form of tourism guided by creativity that is an instrument not only of social cohesion but also of a maintenance order. To better clarify this concept, it is important to consider that degradation is not only what is linked to the physical impoverishment of a property but also everything that determines a decrease in the cultural value of cultural heritage. Cultural artworks are the bearer of intrinsic values that influence the social, environmental, economic, cultural, and above all technological spheres. By acting on this last sphere it is, therefore, possible to influence others according to the ExtrArtis© model, aiming at sustainable regeneration actions. The sustainability to which the model refers is the ability to comply with functional reuse to protect the value of built heritage over time, allowing it to reach future generations. To facilitate the replicability of the model in other contexts, it is necessary to entrust the transformations to the identity specificities of the building to respond appropriately to the functional compatibility of the building with appropriate technological, economic, social, environmental, and cultural solutions. This space–time transferability means that the realignment between the contemporary needs of the users and the services required of the property must pursue not only the architectural and economic capital but also the cultural and social one. Acting in an “extensive” key to the performance of the property, ExtrArtis© focuses on the management of built heritage using art as a renewed form of functional redevelopment for tourism purposes. ExtrArtis© acts, therefore, on the life cycle of the cultural artifact, triggering decision support processes for the reuse project intended to mediate between the transformative need required by technological performance adaptation and the conservative one of impactable value dimensions. ExtrArtis© entrusts art with the ability to rebalance the dynamics of values that, coexisting in time and space, converge in the structural and architectural form of the built environment. Starting from the creative ability to enhance existing resources, ExtrArtis© internally directs the set of actions necessary to ensure the regeneration of property and its extension over time. ExtrArtis© opens the landscape to the creation of new values that can be defined as “transgible”, i.e., common to both material and immaterial culture. These values recognize the existence of a temporal vision of culture that can be associated with the built environment of collective heritage, posing as elements of continuity between past and present in the cultural capital. These values aim to extend the concept of cultural heritage to the inclusion of processes still in place. This affects the dynamics of the process and creates, builds, uses, and modifies the built environment. The genius loci, the spirit of the built environment to be regenerated, becomes a physical place composed over time through the shared co-creation of events, techniques, and cultural expression of the communities that have followed one another over time. The private property that meets the costs of maintenance and performance efficiency today undergoes adaptive reuse with tourist functions that can be regenerated using creative drivers. Built heritage reveals the uniqueness of the technological and value traditions that have been determined over time and, therefore, through this model, the art both offers a less aggressive tourist form and brings to light that intrinsic value inherited over time. In the ExtrArtis© model, creativity slows down consumerist cultural tourism to offer a new way of managing and maintaining the good in time and space. It stands as an innovative solution based on the place for human-centered development through sustainable and circular cultural tourism, to be transferred to other contexts. The replicability of the model in private cultural heritage in a state of degradation but with a high cultural value can make ExtrArtis© a generator of heritage innovation networks towards the formation of an up-scaling cultural ecosystem. Actor involvement, on a co-design and human-centered basis, contributes to the rehabilitation of lesser-known cultural heritage, inclusive economic growth, and the well-being of communities. This collaborative link stimulates effective cross-border, regional, and local cooperation with artists, stakeholders, and decision-makers. This allows the model to act on the physical system of the built environment, composed of the private architectural cultural heritage, and on the system of values and needs of the communities that it involves at different levels. This action allows ExtrArtis© to regenerate as a hinge the asymmetries of the aforementioned systems compared. On the one hand, the artistic action restores the multiscale connections between landscape, city, and property; on the other hand, the contribution of the experimentation of which it is a proponent generates reuse compatible with the technological performance in place and the demanding levels expected by users. This realignment corresponds to the possibility of offering consolidated systems the ability to be not only a testimony of value but to be producers of values themselves. A residence reused through artistic practice triggers a design response to the requirements of users, to the preserved performance, and to the socially rebalanced economic and cultural flow (Figure 4).

ExtrArtis©, as a cultural project and regeneration model, intervenes in the built environment by offering a re-functionalization of buildings burdened by management and maintenance costs to extend their life cycle, and consider these properties as a resource to be reactivated. ExtrArtis© entrusts creativity to be the transformative driver of architectural heritage and subjects it to strategic actions that act on the artifact to also regenerate its urban surroundings. ExtrArtis© addresses the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, providing a solution to the abandonment or degradation of these structures, creatively reintroducing them into the value circuits of the tourist economy (Figure 5).

The quality of the model derives from being the bearer of a creative compatibility of regeneration, attentive to the values of the built environment, and responding to the requirements of use and economic and social sustainability. The artistic activity, of which ExtrArtis© is the bearer, is combined with the tourist one, integrating the development of the economic dynamics of the settlement and preservation of the physical and identity condition of the building. ExtrArtis© aims at “integrated” reuse in compliance with the constraints of the identity of the building, to which it responds through the identification of criteria for creative reuse. The perceptual–cultural constraints are linked to respect for history, the preservation of the aesthetic values of the building, the preservation of the psychological image, and the perceptual characteristics that citizens identify in the building [26]. They find correspondence in the transgible creative criterion that privately built heritage represents even if not usable, which refers to the ability of the property to be an identity reference in the physical and memorial landscape of the communities that directly and indirectly recognize and assume its value. The morphological–dimensional constraints are related to the geometric configuration characters of the building, the type of spaces, and the hierarchical organization of the same [26]. They correspond to the creative criterion of distributive incidence, which refers to the physical capacity of the property to generate through the exercise of its function a redistribution of settlement and economic loads in relation to prefixed periods. The material–constructive constraints concern the behavior of the materials and technologies used in the construction of material culture [26]. Linked to the latter is the creative criterion of cultural distinctiveness, which corresponds to the ability to maintain the functional exercise over time, mitigating the impacts on maintenance and management costs in the cycle of the entire functional exercise at different scales of intervention. The correspondence between the constraints, understood as potential for transformation, and the creative criteria, interpreted as directions of action, generates fundamental requirements considered to be performance conditions. The perceptual–cultural bond, associated with the transgible creative criterion, corresponds to the requirement of identity integration. This happens because the physical dimension of intervening in the temporal image of the building helps to minimize the loss of original materials and technologies avoiding the loss of material and immaterial culture. The morphological–dimensional constraint, associated with the cultural criterion of distributive incidence, corresponds to the requirement of performance permanence of the intervention. This is carried out to avoid the onset of degrading or unresolved phenomena as a result of the intervention. The material–constructive bond, associated with the creative criterion of cultural distinctiveness, corresponds to the requirement of executive predictability. This is carried out by increasing existing capacities and available resources on the expected performance foreshadowing capacity. What makes this model significant is the temporal factor that, regarding the past for the first constraint, the present for the second, and the future for the third, reconnects this dimension to the physical–spatial and identity–values one. Within the model, therefore, the correspondence reveals the ability to realign the dimensions of the built environment of the cultural heritage to be considered (Figure 6).

The model developed proposes a set of criteria to be followed to be able to comply with the built-environment regeneration actions addressed in the paper. In particular, the application of this model allows for the testing of the criteria identified as guiding the most appropriate choices for the reuse of the cultural heritage and the context in which the actions were taken. The mansion was reused within the limits imposed by the constraints on transformation, while its performance realignment, compared with the demands of time, took into account both the multi-actor nature of the process and a different scale.

ExtrArtis© represents a model, tested from May 2022 to May 2023, which contains in itself a double meaning of innovation. On the one hand, creative criteria are linked to the performance requirements of space–time–value realignment; on the other, the process innovation is determined by ExtrArtis©’s ability to generate a dialogue between the actors and, above all, between the phases of the culture-led regeneration process. ExtrArtis© is based on the multiscale exchange of knowledge, approaches, and flows aimed at the possibility of passing on heritage to future generations. The synergies that the model offers to trigger represent a potential and operational contribution of communities, professions, and entrepreneurship. In particular, ExtrArtis© offers support to the creation of cultural and creative companies involved in the managerial and entrepreneurial aspects related to the protection, enhancement, and management in an ecosystem perspective of natural and cultural resources. The intervention returns the identification of the network of relationships, necessary resources, activities, and the promotion of innovative entrepreneurial initiatives aimed at protecting, strengthening, and promoting the identity of local communities through the artistic, historical, cultural, and natural local enhancement, the redevelopment and re-functionalization of cultural heritage.

6. Conclusions

The article presents an approach to heritage and built environment regeneration using creative enterprises, with particular attention to the ExtrArtis© model in Italy. The research addresses relevant issues related to built heritage, adaptive reuse, and social engagement, richly supported by recent bibliography, mainly focused on the European context. Cultural-led heritage reuse is introduced through various strategies that combine community, built environment, and creative enterprises that facilitate the transformation. The ExtrArtis© model constitutes a creative model and project for culture-led regeneration, which has developed various experiences with artist residencies, thoroughly assessed in the paper using a detailed matrix of benefits. As a counterbalance, a matrix of criteria for its application is included, which can be useful for further applications and demonstrates the replicability of the model. In particular, the paper makes an effort on a methodological level to connect different disciplinary areas, demonstrating how creative companies can regenerate the built environment through the artist residency tool, producing a tested and awarded model on a European scale from which criteria are drawn up to address these processes. This model makes it possible to answer the paper’s research question about how the built environment can be regenerated through actions directed by creative companies acting on the territory. The paper explains the tools of model construction through the merger between an economic vision germane to the possibilities of the territory and the requirements necessary for a circular regeneration of the built environment. The use of the tool of the artist residency represents for the creative company the means by which to apply the criteria governing such regeneration. This opens the research towards cultural tourism linked to European cultural identity, in which the community recognizes itself by tracing processes of adaptive reuse that determine transversal areas of innovation. The ability of ExtrArtis© to represent a human-centered model, inclusive and aimed at the rediscovery of regional and European identity, generates the stimulation, through educational and recreational activities, of the tracing of European cultural routes for the development of cultural heritage. ExtrArtis© focuses on a shared sense of belonging based on the tangible and intangible values of history by introducing new ones, and the transgible, as a binder of the expressions of the cultural heritage of the communities that over time have built the heritage. ExtrArtis©, therefore, directs creative enterprises to the involvement of communities linked by the same domain of knowledge and expands them through participation in the same practice. This happens through art and the networks that the latter can generate through flows of ideas, criticalities, and values that are maximized by the acquisition of identity awareness of individuals who participate in recognizing themselves as a collective. When the individual actors of the reuse process acquire and exchange information, they build networks that increase the sense of belonging and commitment to the care of the cultural heritage being tested. ExtrArtis© promotes, therefore, circular tourism starting from the ability of the company to apply the project to generate a co-creative exercise. ExtrArtis© demonstrates the importance of establishing connections and therefore exchanges between expert knowledge and common knowledge about latent criticalities and new resolution tools. This sharing determines the learning and advancement of both knowledge, by experimenting with participatory methodologies, and approaches aimed at determining development implementation strategies and innovative networks for a circular cultural tourism germane to the instances of transformation of lesser-known heritage.

7. Patents

The Italian Ministry of Economic Development Directorate General for the Protection of Industrial Property: Italian Patent and Trademark Office—Certificate of Registration for Trademark ExtrArtis©.