Francesca Ciampa

Historic coastal built heritage across Europe is increasingly exposed to multiple forms of degradation, shifting resulting from the anthropic and to environmental pressures. Interventions aimed at its reuse still struggle to reconcile regeneration requirements with the creative, social, and economic functions to keep these sites relevant to their communities. The Joint Declaration “Europe for Culture—Culture for Europe” (2026), and the European Commission provides a new shared culture and creative-led vision for interpreting regeneration processes as connection among individual, social, spatial, territorial, environmental, and institutional dimensions. This vision raises specific architectural and planning challenges: the need to reconcile overlapping heritage, landscape, and environmental protection regimes with the introduction of new creative and social functions, and to favour lightweight, reversible, and demountable interventions over permanent transformations. However, a gap lies in the lack of structured tools capable of guiding the creative regeneration of historic coastal built heritage under these constraints. While culture and creative-led regeneration, and adaptive reuse have been extensively investigated, the translation of creative regeneration principles into operational actions for the transformation of historic coastal built heritage into artist residencies remains insufficiently systematised into replicable design criteria for architectural and planning practice. Within this framework, the research aims to translate the aforementioned culture and creative-led vision into operational guidelines for improving the adaptive reuse of built heritage as artist residencies, providing a set of criteria that link European cultural-policy objectives to concrete architectural and planning actions for artist-in-residence adaptive reuse. The iterative methodology consists in three main phases: a knowledge phase, based on bibliometric and systematic analysis of the literature review and best practices; a development phase, which systematises these outcomes into operational framework (consisting of dimension and criteria) and integrates them in an Impact Evaluation Matrix; and a transfer phase, in which the proposed framework is applied and tested in an Italian case study. The research outcomes are operational guidelines for the creative regeneration of the built environment, conceived as innovative tools to guide an appropriate project in the historic urban coastal landscape. The proposed framework, unlike existing adaptive-reuse and artist-in-residence approaches, integrates functional, spatial, socio-cultural, and economic criteria within an Impact Evaluation Matrix. It has been tested in the case study of Torre Minerva within the Punta Campanella Marine Protected Area in Italy.

In the European Green Deal and Renovation Wave framework, cities should be more self-sufficient and sustainable, promoting investment in the regeneration and maintenance of the built and natural heritage. The New European Bauhaus reinforces this vision, promoting the value of beauty as a product of environmental harmony/sustainability and participation. Many cities are already working to improve infrastructure and public services, with the aim of creating better socio-economic and environmental conditions in urbanised areas. At the same time, they aim to increase and relocate attractiveness and competitiveness to less densified rural areas, and to reduce overcrowding problems in cities. The aim is to propose a virtuous model of circular regeneration, by identifying virtuous strategies of the regeneration of rural villages capable of aligning the transformation of the built environment with climate objectives, social cohesion and local economy strengthening, and the integration of historical and identity values. Rural villages in marginal areas are left behind places. They require new economic development strategies, grounded in a circular bio-economy model for reducing/avoiding spiraled down processes. The application of European evaluation criteria to the main topic literature background allowed for the construction of a virtuous practices observatory about regenerated rural villages, which is elaborated using registry, systemic, and analytical/analysis forms. From the ex-post evaluation analysis of the case studies, it was possible to identify a number of dimensions/clusters in which investment is being made today for the regeneration of rural villages. By reasoning on the investment clusters, it was possible to identify a circular regeneration model for rural villages, transferable to other realities in order to implement the broader vision of circular settlement development. The “Rural Village Regeneration Model” represents an operational tool for regional transformation, suitable for reactivating lost connections between rural villages and larger towns in functional areas, characterised by greater self-sufficiency and exploration of the potential of digital tools to improve services, connections, infrastructure, and cooperation.

Regenerating cultural heritage implies adopting a systemic and multi-scalar approach capable of considering the characteristics and flows of relations between the different components of the system. The regeneration project can be a circular strategy to reconnect people and places, generating and regenerating material and immaterial values of cultural heritage as a ‘common good’. The research proposes a circular and participatory regeneration model, validated through an evaluative framework. It supports decision-making and assesses the multidimensional impacts of reuse, redevelopment, maintenance and management practices of the commons, at all stages of the recovery project, and with respect to emerging instances and criteria adopted in existing policies.

Open spaces for collective use in the built heritage of cities are the places to promote and sustain social, cultural, and economic changes. The transformation of the built environment raises awareness of following the policies and tools for the implementation of the EU New Generation Programme, redefining the framework of intervention priorities at the urban scale. Tackling the increasing physical degradation, underutilization, social disparity, and loss of the tangible and intangible culture of these types of spaces, this research identifies artistic production and social cohesion as the enabling factors of maintenance. The regeneration of areas of collective use returns an experimentation of strategic importance for the participatory and shared care of consolidated heritage contexts. The Sanità district in Naples represents a case study of a community-built custom playground, testing a co-design approach, maintaining the consolidated qualities, and awakening the responsibility of the youngest. The outcome is a circular model that focuses on the regeneration of such spaces, transforming an abandoned built environment from waste into a resource.

In the context of anthropogenic impacts on pollution and global warming scenarios, reject from the construction sector accounts for 36% of European waste. This waste percentage includes disused and abandoned buildings that have lost the value of their function over time. In order to reduce the ecological footprint they generate, the paper rethinks Recovery in its circular meaning to put these buildings back into a normal circuit of usability, improving the creation of resilient urban habitats. In particular, decommissioned ecclesiastical buildings constitute a huge quantity and significant quality heritage, as by cultural, perceptive, morphological and material values. The sustainable reuse of this heritage must act on its double impacting value: the tangible one linked to the material culture of the buildings and the intangible one, linked to the identity values of sediment instances. Through a comparison desk research of more than 140 cases of reuse on a European scale, the contribution arrives at a system of indicators that allow evaluating the reuse sustainable compatibility of these buildings, able to promote prosperity, inclusiveness and social equity. These indicators make it possible to assess the appropriateness of design actions aimed at mediating between the conservation of the built heritage and the transformative needs of contemporary instances. The results provide scenarios tool of sustainable recovery, capable of transforming waste into a resource, extending the life cycle of the ecclesiastical heritage and thus mitigating its environmental impact, as well as the cost related to the loss of cultural values and identity for the community.

In the context of the global climate crisis and the resulting catastrophic flooding phenomena, the contribution looks at an innovative digital model for the coastal recovery, attentive to the protection of waterfronts and their stakeholders. By intervening in the relationship between transformation and conservation of built environment, it is necessary to establish governance support tools capable of foreseeing emergency scenarios to protect the population. The research looks at the port areas of coastal cities as a contemporary and collective public space in which to test the collaborative digital model proposed for waterfronts recovery and maintenance. The need-based methodological process used the human life protection, exposed to flooding danger, as the input of a design process. Through a survey and modeling phase, the waterfront breaks down into environmental and technological systems, specifying the extent of the failure. The waterfront digitization allows providing the governance with a sensor alert tool that gives the monitoring of the behavior and the state of the waterfront elements’ degradation. This information is simplified and given back to the users who both made responsible for the maintenance culture of the places they use and alerted to the possible danger they are exposed. The case is Atrani, where an internal flooding, caused by the estuary overflowing, degenerated in the entire coastal system up to the sea. The results provide a digital model capable of exploring and optimizing the coastal built environment to increase the governance capacity and the waterfront performance.