Towards a Sustainable Use of Architectural Heritage: How to Assess Accessibility and the User’s Role

Abstract

Scientific communities and institutional bodies are supporting many shared efforts towards improving accessibility to architectural heritage, in the awareness that it provides the basis for inclusion and enhancement. Accessibility is related to the wider tendency toward a conscious and sustainable use of the architectural heritage, considered as a multifaceted tool for its conservation. This has also highlighted the user’s role, which is paramount in order to reach and increase sustainable processes in the field of architectural heritage, as well as in all the technological processes. The user should be active in his/her relationships with the built heritage, in a multi-sensorial way and in a secure and comfortable manner; digital innovation offers many important tools for this aim. The first section of the paper summarises the evolution of the controversial relationships between use and conservation of the architectural heritage. The conflict between the requirements of using and the constraints of the conservation still poses many theoretical and design challenges, but a more responsible role of the ‘visitors’ (better considered as ‘users’) can help the built heritage to leave its ivory tower. The second section, after outlining the performance-based approach as a basic analysis and early-design methodology centred on the user’s exigences, firstly describes the meanings and consequences of the kinds of user and the dimensions of use in architectural heritage; secondly it describes the main economic, social, and environmental aspects of sustainability that regard the use of built heritage. The remaining sections of the paper are devoted to the results of multidisciplinary and multiscale studies that address the accessibility of architectural heritage from many points of view. In particular, an assessment method is tested to support decision-making processes oriented towards a quality-oriented design, focused on the accessibility to the architectural heritage. Ancient architectural heritage is here considered a sort of borderline case, in which the general critical conditions of the built heritage are emphasized. The inclusion of users, especially by reinforcing their awareness and active role, is proposed as a tool in the sustainable exploitation of architectural heritage, to be applied in many aspects of management, such as community engagement and planned maintenance.