Contemporary Challenges for Urban Built Environment and Landscape Conservation: Social, Cultural and Economic Issues

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Contexts and Urban-Rural Interactions".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2025 | Viewed by 2166

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Architecture, Built Environment, and Construction Enginnering, Politecnico di Milano, Via Ponzio 31, 20133 Milan, Italy
Interests: urban environment; landscape; heritage conservation; real estate appraisal; economic evaluation; cultural heritage; environmental resources management

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Architecture, Built Environment, and Construction Enginnering, Politecnico di Milano, Via Ponzio 31, 20133 Milan, Italy
Interests: urban environment; landscape; heritage conservation; real estate appraisal; economic evaluation; architectural heritage; social value

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the last few decades, growing concern about the negative effects of climate change, environmental degradation, and a land consumption-based planning approach has driven decision-makers to opt for sustainable development models in projects and plans at the urban and landscape scales. This shift in paradigm has resulted in a focus on territorial and urban systems’ built heritage dimension as a possible source for making cities, human settlements, and landscapes inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. However, the acknowledgement of built heritage’s possible role in sustainable and multi-dimensional development is still struggling to find reflection in intervention and planning practice due to the high thematic and operative complexity of heritage assets’ specificities.

Such a complexity, stemming from the need to balance heritage asset value protection with the social and economic sustainability of conservation interventions, poses several challenges of a cultural, social, and economic nature to decision-makers, planners, and scholars.

This Special Issue is aimed at collecting a variety of research papers and reviews to frame an interdisciplinary and structured debate on how to interpret and address the contemporary challenges related to built heritage conservation. Moreover, coherently with the journal scope, it aims to reflect on heritage conservation’s space in the UN’s urban and landscape planning agenda 2030 (SDG 11) and on the possible role of assessment and evaluation frameworks toward addressing these challenges from an economic, social, and cultural perspective, considering the interaction between these dimensions.

Within this general thematic frame, this Special Issue welcomes articles dealing with the following:

  • The existing criticalities or ‘virtuous’ elements in the relationship between territorial planning and conservation at the national and international levels;
  • Innovative planning and decision-making approaches to heritage conservation at the urban and landscape scale;
  • Heritage-driven or culture-driven approaches to urban and landscape regeneration;
  • Participatory approaches to conservation issues and local community roles in heritage landscape planning and decision-making processes;
  • Built heritage conservation’s specificities and challenges in development and transformation processes related to different territorial contexts (urban landscape and rural landscape);
  • The cultural, social, and economic dimension of built heritage reuse and landscape enhancement;
  • Assessment and evaluation methodologies to support conservation decisions;
  • The multi-dimensional value of cultural heritage assets and landscape.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Francesca Torrieri
Dr. Marco Rossitti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • heritage conservation
  • cultural landscape
  • built environment
  • urban planning
  • economic evaluation
  • reuse
  • participation
  • social value
  • decision-making
  • sustainable development

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

31 pages, 7498 KiB  
Article
Assessing the Feasibility of PPPs for Cultural Heritage Enhancement in UNESCO Sites: The Case of Matera (Italy)
by Francesca Torrieri, Alessia Crisopulli and Marco Rossitti
Land 2025, 14(4), 898; https://doi.org/10.3390/land14040898 - 18 Apr 2025
Viewed by 199
Abstract
The complexity of decision making about cultural heritage has drawn attention to hybrid and innovative models to support the challenge of its enhancement. In this context, public–private partnership (PPP) has emerged as a promising tool to address the public administration’s lack of financial [...] Read more.
The complexity of decision making about cultural heritage has drawn attention to hybrid and innovative models to support the challenge of its enhancement. In this context, public–private partnership (PPP) has emerged as a promising tool to address the public administration’s lack of financial resources. However, several barriers have hindered the wide application of PPPs to support heritage enhancement initiatives, thus highlighting the need to provide decision-making processes with appropriate methodological tools, especially in contexts such as UNESCO sites, where heritage conservation rises to a global challenge. Based on these premises, the paper proposes a methodological approach to support decision making about implementing PPPs for heritage enhancement in UNESCO sites by evaluating the financial sustainability of different PPP scenarios, while considering their ability to ensure a fair distribution of benefits between the public and the private. After providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between PPPs and UNESCO sites in Italy, such an approach was tested on a case study, the “I Sassi di Matera” site that, over the last decades, has made PPPs a central tool for its enhancement strategy. The test results reveal the opportunities of the proposed approach to inform decision making and delve into PPP’s potential for heritage enhancement while outlining the related future research perspectives to ensure its broad scalability to other UNESCO contexts. Full article
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28 pages, 8874 KiB  
Article
Suburban Landscape and Public Housing: The Post-Occupancy Evaluation as a Tool for Built Environment Regeneration: A Case Study in the City of Naples, Italy
by Luca Borriello, Fabiana Forte, Yvonne Russo and Silvia Scardapane
Land 2025, 14(2), 211; https://doi.org/10.3390/land14020211 - 21 Jan 2025
Viewed by 1083
Abstract
The European Landscape Convention (ELC) acknowledges that the landscape is an important part of the quality of life for people everywhere, in urban areas and the countryside, in degraded areas as well as higher quality areas and recognized as being of outstanding beauty, [...] Read more.
The European Landscape Convention (ELC) acknowledges that the landscape is an important part of the quality of life for people everywhere, in urban areas and the countryside, in degraded areas as well as higher quality areas and recognized as being of outstanding beauty, as well as in everyday areas. Nowadays, many suburbs, arisen as public housing neighborhoods and originally located in peri-urban areas, in addition to constituting a substantial part of the built heritage, are increasingly being configured as new strategic areas, redefining the daily landscape of its users. With the post-occupancy evaluation method (POE), it is possible to assess several aspects of the performance of buildings or open spaces from the users’ perspective, taking into consideration objective and subjective factors. It is a multi-method approach, combining interviews, customer satisfaction surveys, behavioral observation, etc. With this perspective, the article, dealing with the ‘Parco dei Murales’, which is a complex of public housing localized in the Ponticelli suburb in the city of Naples (Italy), aims to understand the visual and qualitative perception of the suburban landscape in the light of the transformation processes that have occurred in recent years. For this purpose, starting from the results of the first application of a user satisfaction survey, the post occupancy evaluation has been applied, analyzing the functional, social, and perceptual attributes of the open spaces of the park. Full article
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