Heritage of historic cities

Abstract

The issue of historical cities has a great charm and suggests new and different ways to look back to the city and its transformations. The reference to historic cities is an evolution and innovation both in content and methods in order to manage intervention inside the city. During the last forty years the concept of “historical center” has evolved into the concept of “historic city”, extending the debate from the city we knew, that one to preserve, to the city to be transformed. The dialectic between preservation and transformation goes through more than a century and promotes reflections on the future of the city referred to urban planning theory and pushes us to innovate in the methods of reading and practice interventions. Conceptualization and identification of the historical city constitute a research topic of considerable complexity.