Il patrimonio in azione: Mobilizzare il passato nella rigenerazione ecologica delle città europee

Contemporary urban regeneration, as well as territorial development schemes, place growing emphasis on heritage as a driving force for development, rather than a static constraint. Thus, spatial planning is incorporating the issues of conservation, trying to establish new synergies with the emerging environmental and social agendas. Despite increasing attention in public debate, in practice and literature there is a lack of works exploring how the combined fields of heritage and planning are transforming cities and territories. This paper investigates the current planning practices mobilising heritage, understood as a set of socio-cultural and spatial arrangements, tangible and intangible, cultural and natural resources. Three European case studies, namely Lisbon, Gdansk, and Stockholm, provide insights on the processes involving different types of heritage as driving agents of socio-spatial change, adopting an inter-scalar approach. The results highlight the entanglement of heritage with themes such as the quest for sustainability, the shaping of narratives, the issues of spatial-environmental justice, the role of landscape.