According to the current European conditions, culture-led urban regeneration policies and practices are being enhanced by the introduction of interdisciplinary innovative approaches. These involve the development of methodologies and tools that are able to address material and immaterial networks of microcommunities in a systemic and circular manner of thinking among cultures, economies, and processes. When talking about overturning hierarchies and power relations and creating the conditions that are necessary to encourage a new collaborative cultural regeneration of urban public spaces and places, some open questions can be relevant: What kind of cultural resources do we have to optimize for achieving local sustainable development in response to global challenges? What kinds of new uses for public spaces and places must we improve in order to generate complex values and enhance the engagement of communities? How could communities activate themselves for building complex values networks? In order to understand how positive initiatives are activated as a "chain reaction" and facing unsolved conflicts and building new productive values systems tailor-made for a specific context are made possible, the present paper explores the components of new forms of local complex values networks in regeneration processes, based upon the ex-post evaluation of some selected Italian practices with the multi-criteria method PROMETHEE-GAIA.
The international debate on cultural heritage enhancement and cultural cross-overs, highlights the need to rethink the relationship between economy, society and territory by working on innovative urban planning and evaluation approaches. In recent times, the concept of “place branding” has become widespread in strategic urban plans, linking marketing approaches to the attractive features of places. The purpose of this study is to outline a holistic approach to cultural heritage enhancement for urban regeneration based on creative and collaborative place branding: “Community branding”. The methodology was tested in Pisticci—near Matera (Basilicata region, Italy)—starting from its historic center. As a multi-methodological decision-making process, Community branding combines approaches and tools derived from Place Branding, Community Planning, Community Impact Evaluation and Place Marketing. The main results achieved include: an innovative approach that combines both management and planning aspects and empowers communities and skills in network; the co-evaluation of cultural, social and economic impacts for the Pisticci Sustainable Urban Lab (PLUS); the writing and signing of an “urban contract” with local Municipality, research centers and PLUS hub association.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.