Recycling Heritage Between Planning and Design Interventions

The topic of recycling and contemporary approaches to sustainable urban and landscape renewal are nowadays extended to those parts of our territory that, although characterised by important historical traces, are in a critical condition of drosscapes: this is the case of archaeological sites, abandoned places “in-between” city and landscape and past and present, whose relationship with the environment life cycle is interrupted and in which the concepts of “ruin” and “heritage” are easily confused with those of “residue” and “waste”. The last important Italian National Research Programme (PRIN) called “Re-cycle Italy: New Lifecycles for Architecture and Infrastructure of Cities and Landscape” has connoted new complex issues in the triad Reuse/Reduce/Recycle and defined new interpretative matrices on the relationship between heritage protection, sustainable design and urban planning. Both under an epistemological and architectural perspective, a new interpretative approach emerges with a critical look entirely focusing on the archaeological sites’ “life cycle” and on the modalities through which they “dialogue” with the social dimension of the environment. This chapter fits within this framework, through a critical analysis of the relationship between the concept of recycle and interdisciplinary actions in the archaeological landscapes between planning methods and design experiences.