Cultural heritage can play a strategic role in developing a sustainable built environment, contributing to the improvement of the economic, social, and environmental productivity of a city. Human activities are constantly affecting the quality of the environment and altering the ecosystems, which produce negative consequences also on human wellbeing. Within this context, it has been much discussed how cities and the built environment can counteract this process by supporting more sustainable development. Adaptive reuse is defined as “a process that changes a disused or ineffective item into a new item that can be used for a different purpose”, which strongly triggers the sustainable development of cities. It can be recognized as a promoter of economic growth, social wellbeing, and environmental preservation, given its capability of both preserving past values and creating new ones. The adaptive reuse matches the main points of the circular economy, seen as the sustainable economy, which is aimed at the reduction of natural resource extraction and environmental impact by extending the useful life of materials and promoting recovery, reuse, and regeneration processes. Given these premises, the current contribution aimed to evaluate alternative scenarios for reuse in Castello Visconteo in Cusago, located in the Lombardy region (Italy), and understanding how adaptive reuse could contribute to generating new values within a circular economy perspective. In detail, four alternative scenarios were proposed to face the new needs born during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Since both intangible and tangible values must be considered, a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been applied by combining economic and qualitative indicators to define the most suitable function for its adaptive reuse. In detail, the Novel Approach to Imprecise Assessment and Decision Environments (NAIADE) was used to identify the best alternative solution based on the opinions of conflicting stakeholders. The innovativeness of the contribution is given by the combination of different methodologies, the preservation of the memory and the generation of new values, and the consideration of adaptive reuse as a strategy for the achievement of sustainable development within a circular economy perspective.

The present paper describes the design strategies of an ecosystem of tools and services, currently under construction, developed in cooperation among archaeologists and computer science experts of the Università degli Studi di Milano and architects and topographers of the Politecnico di Milano. This ecosystem is based on the archaeological experience carried out in Tarquinia since 1982 in the frame of the "Tarquinia Project". The project takes into account the analysis and processing of multifaceted archaeological evidences in a context-oriented environment, in which interdisciplinary contributions of several scientist are combined and integrated, in order to grasp the original system of interaction of different branches of the ancient reality.Such a cooperation needs a system of "query/communication" able to integrate archaeological data, artefacts and architectural structures (subsoil and over-ground), cartographic and photographic documentation and scientific contents, achieved in the past and implemented during the field research. The proposed ecosystem aims to provide a set of services for federating different existing data-sources (GIS, including 3D tools), through the definition of a semantic network of relationships among landscapes, stratigraphic layers, structures and artefacts of an excavation site (ArchMatrix). This ecosystem is based on an innovative global design method, focused on the management of raw-data captured and analyzed by different experts in a collaborative way. The aim is to develop a solution able to support analyses and studies grounded in the real needs of the archaeological investigation, by enabling archaeologists in producing archaeological and historical interpretations starting from the real core of the documentation they deal with. In such a framework, the present paper focuses on a novel approach to identify the object of the archaeological research, starting from the needs of field archaeology, and on the design of a system meant to solve problems according to an integrated approach in a unique context of analysis.

The Town Hall of Besozzo (Varese, Italy) is located in the city centre of the village and its first construction phase is dated back to the XIV-XV century. It shows a complex palimpsest which is the result of the numerous transformations occurred during its life: enlargements, super elevations, demolitions, inner spaces subdivisions and use changes. Currently a project has been issued for the reuse of the building which assigns new spaces for the town offices to the northern wing recently acquired. The aim of the research was to provide a diagnostic insight, useful for the development of the conservation project which will necessarily take into account the multitude of values registered on the building. Owing to a lack of meaningful archival documentation, the elevation’s stratigraphic reading and the methods for dating historical buildings proved to be an invaluable resource for the comprehension of the building’s transformations. Cross-referencing readings of indirect sources carried on the building with the results of the in-depth analysis made it possible to rebuild the growth of the structure from its origin to the present days. Such analysis includes: geometric survey, photographic rectifications of facade and inner sections, non-destructive diagnostic investigations, bricks, mortar and plaster chemical-physical analysis, mensiochronology, study of the building techniques and chronotypology which is a stylistic analysis performed both on the constructive (apertures) and decorative (shelves, graffiti, colourings traces) architectural elements. Blending the results of these dating techniques produced the complexity of the stratigraphic reading which has been conveyed with adequate hatching on the rectified images (U.S. – Stratigraphic Unity) while schematic 3D reconstructions exemplify the chronological sequence of the building activities. Individuation and comprehension of the building constructive phases made also possible to understand which were the different uses of each room inside this domestic architecture thus providing the client and the bodies in charge of protection with valuable data for the preservation project.

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