The IoT as a Key in the Sensitive Balance between Development Needs and Sustainable Conservation of Cultural Resources in Italian Heritage Cities

Abstract

In recent years the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to the built heritage has been increasingly finalized to heritage promotion in order to maximize visitor flows. New urgent challenges facing built heritage loom now over its very existence and our possibilities to preserve it for future generations. Italian heritage cities represent a delicate context, where concerns related to tourist flows and resource consumption are amplified due to the concentration of sites and points of interests in urban areas, also in very small ones, while tourism remains vital for economic growth. In such contexts, balancing economic development and sustainable heritage conservation demands well-calibrated tools and approaches. The article presents an overview of the ways the Internet of Things (IoT) is currently used to solve urban issues and support heritage projects. On this basis, and considering the characters and problems typical of heritage cities, as well as the features of the Italian scenario, the most appropriate application lines of IoT for the Italian heritage cities are identified. Then, their potentialities, the mutual impacts between them and the heritage field and the key role of the IoT in supporting the delicate balance between economic development and cultural resource conservation are finally discussed.

Fuzzy and Interval AHP Approaches in Sustainable Management for the Architectural Heritage in Smart Cities

“…It also increases the awareness of citizens about architectural heritage and new opportunities for active participation at a distance, by expressing views within the survey, giving proposals for the reconstruction of buildings by participating in numerous international calls. The use of IoT platforms and services opens up opportunities for the application of smart cities in the architectural heritage sector [80,81]. Some of the techniques used to preserve the architectural heritage are GIS (geographic information system) platforms for the formation of different spatial databases related to updating analysis properties [82], digital photogrammetry techniques, BIM (building information modeling) software that enables the classification of built heritage through modeling systems facilities, automation of documents related to heritage management, application of materials and interventions, as well as numerous software and methods for diagnosing the state of structures and detecting problems.…”

Languages and Context Issues of ICTs for a New Role of Museums in the COVID-19 Era

“…Technologies that can support the dialogue with networked visitors will deserve, then, a special attention, to know more about them and the space that the cultural experience has in their lives, what time is dedicated to cultural experience and what other urban and cultural markers it can semantically connect to, or, on the contrary, compete with to gain users' available time within a typical day. It can be important to identify possible connections and new cultural services to offer in a "cultural system" logic, and can represent the opportunity to define new profiling and tracking modalities for preferences and fruition patterns, less susceptible of the "resistance to the system" [66] that is typical, for example, of wearable devices, but anyway shared and accepted. In this sense, a change in attitude among institutions, and their ability to consider other museums no more as "competitors" but as "colleagues" committed in a common endeavor, will be anyway decisive.…”

Conceptualization of a Dialectic Between an Internet of Things System and Cultural Heritage

“…Thus, the Internet of Things promotes and even helps in the cultural heritage preservation, conservation, and sustainability. The maintenance of cultural heritage will lead to the development of smart territories, insofar as the smart economy is one of the parameters but also because the cultural heritage is related to the other dimensions considered in the definition of what is a smart territory, namely, people, governance, smart living, mobility, and environment [8,21,22]. Thus, the three buzzwords have been associated: IoT, cultural heritage, and smart territories, in a logic of shared gains, where some contribute to the development and recognition of others (cultural heritage) and these become key pieces for the recognition of the importance of others (IoT and smart territories).…”

“…Understand how certain practices are relevant to the population, the rituals that are present, the way they coexist and come together. Especially activities 3, 6, 7, and 8 contributed to the perception of the importance of religion (activities 3 and 6), for example, times when the whole family gets together, but also for the perception of the way the meetings are always moments when, even without knowing what it is about, people 8). The serenade was also a moment of gathering of the emigrants who were in the village at the time of the summer.…”

“…Furthermore, it intends to point out how it can contribute to the development of smart territories, following the relational exercise of (1) promoting the increase in knowledge of cultural heritage (through the involvement of different generations in the construction of a list of material and immaterial cultural heritage) and (2) facilitating its access, through the co-creation of an IoT system, and how it will be possible to contribute that its demand and preservation become appealing (namely, with tourism) and, consequently, for the territory sustainability [8].…”