Wasting heritage. The slow abandonment of the Italian Historic Centers

The international debate that led to the drafting of important institutional documents and charters on the city considered the conservation of cultural heritage essential to planning choices and favored the sustainability of the high-density model for historic centers. Italian theory and policy regarding intervention on the historic city provided a major contribution to this debate and the extensive conservation and development policies that emerged benefitted from a general and shared consensus. All the same, analysis of the statistical data on population and real estate in some Italian cities over the last 30 years suggests that the effects of the relationship between these policies and settlement choices should be further questioned. The goal of this paper is to define a precise framework for the dynamics characterizing northern Italian historic centers in the medium and long-term, focusing attention on the use of real estate property and the location choices of families, institutions and enterprises. The results show that historic centers have progressively lost their social and economic attractiveness because of the structural mutations in Italian society and the country's economy. The dense regulatory mechanisms that had matured and were tested over decades of economic and demographic growth no longer appear to hold.