Refurbishment and Conservation in Sustainable Renewal of Architectural and Urban Heritage. Conceptual and Technological Questions

The research about sustainable urban development has interested many disciplinary sectors, and consequently has produced guidelines, official declarations and agreements, has produced practices about the management of urban environment. There is a “hole” about the question of adapting different strategies in those urban environment which may be quite peculiar, such as historic centres and more generally those part of cities which are strongly characterised by environmental constrains due to the architectural heritage. Frequently urban sustainable models refer to cities which expand their settlements, and/or refer to ecological-energetic questions, to participative questions, expressing only general consideration about the role and the value of architectural and urban heritage. The approaches seem in some way independent to the cultural character of the built environment. One of the reason may be found in the distance existing between those disciplines which in the first turn started looking at the question of sustainability, and the statutory approach of disciplines of conservation, which seem quite unaware regarding the same question of sustainability. This paper aims to explore the possibility of finding a linkage between the conceptual statements of discipline of conservation, and the principles of sustainable urban development, by the analysis of conceptual frameworks which are widely accepted in the literature, the use of examples and the construction of some parallelisms.