The European Union identifies the cultural heritage of cities as the main driver of development strategies. From this perspective, adaptive reuse can play a decisive role not only in terms of increasing the life cycle of the heritage but also as an urban strategy capable of generating new economic, cultural, and social values, thus supporting innovative dynamics of local development. The aim is to propose an integrated evaluation model based on the combined use of multi-criteria techniques, which helps to classify adaptive reuse strategies of unused cultural heritage assets and supports decision-makers in the implementation of development strategies in vulnerable contexts. The case study focuses on the potential reuse of some historical fortifications located along the coasts of the Strait of Messina in Southern Italy. The results obtained show that the proposed model can be a useful decision support tool, in contexts characterized by high complexity, able to guarantee the transparency of the decision-making process, and in which it is necessary to highlight the elements that influence the dynamics of the choice for the construction of shared development strategies.

Available resources to public policies are always limited: those intended for culture, too often considered non-essential to the development of the community, they are often essential in particular way. Ignoring the economic value of cultural resources, their conservation, costs and total benefits of cultural policies and investment projects with a strong cultural component, can lead to non-optimal allocation of resources, to degradation of cultural capital and to failure to exploit opportunities for development.Another important aspect is the use of resources for the physical recovery and reuse of assets, without adequate attention to the phase of management: too often you find yourself with assets recovered but unused due to the lack of resources for management. A method tested recently is the involvement of private companies in these activities: in economically stronger and more advanced realities, the size of the most significant tourist flows allows to reach levels of return on investment and so makes this a feasible solution.Cultural resources in the rural settings of the most economically disadvantaged areas are characterized by a not elevated number of visitors not spread in the same way throughout the whole year: in these conditions, because of their different costs structures, a company may not have sufficient profit margins, but a private non-profit organizations can achieve a balanced budget that allows the usability of assets of fundamental importance into development strategies based on cultural tourism.This paper focuses on the main economic appraisal aspects and illustrates a management model, economically sustainable, for the tourist value of cultural and environmental resources, particularly suitable to be applied in rural contexts and in economically disadvantaged realities; the analyzed case study is indeed located in Gerace, ionic inland town of Calabria, region of southern Italy.

This article is part of the debate on the economic evaluation of urban regeneration projects to be implemented through partnership forms between public and private subjects. It illustrates the results of the research activity carried out by the authors, aimed at developing innovative tools to verify the economic feasibility and the sustainability of projects for the reuse of unused public buildings. Particularly, the study made it possible to develop an experimental model of economic feasibility project to be used in the. The model aims at verifying if the economic conditions are satisfied, and which ones, if any, are appealing for the private involvement within the realization and/or management of collective utility interventions. Significant points of the model are: (1) The inclusion of real estate re-use projects in the wider context of urban and territorial regeneration; (2) the adoption of criteria to assess costs and revenues remarkably eligible, in the authors’ opinion, to understand the effective economic feasibility and/or sustainability of reuse projects, even under the framework of reliable techniques as the ‘Cash Flow Analysis’ and the ‘Discounted Cash Flow Analysis’.

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