Energy and Ecology Efficiency as a Chance for Cultural Heritage

The energy and ecology efficiency issues today constitute the opportunities to create a rich economy of cultural heritage that could be based on urban regeneration, protection and recovery. There is a great need to promote new businesses capable of achieving urban resilience but also knowledge of the ancient, reinvigorating investment in cultural heritage, according to long-term planning. One must be able to re-elaborate new energy-ecology-productive districts where cultural tradition has sedimented the artisan work and the social cohesion of the territories, reaching the world's top technology in industrial innovation of public and privat companies. None of the ancient technologies and architectures are now available tout court, there are no longer those technologies, those companies, intellectuals and even those funds, but we can draw lessons for today, reworking our cultural heritage in the new times in the key of urban regeneration. In the latest trends regarding the safeguarding and preservation of cultural heritage, the concept of ‘conservation’ has increasingly taken on the meaning of assigning compatible roles to buildings and historic environments, adapting them to modern-day life, a way of life for which they were not designed. This involves transforming historic centres and towns by handling the historic environment as if it were a living organism that moves and is made up of its parts, of the activities that take place there, within which it is not enough to add this or that extra function to transform it; instead, one needs to adopt a resilience and holistic approach that is equal to the task of tackling today’s particular challenges of environment, the natural hazards and risks and modern man’s needs, whilst at the same time preserving the ‘slowness of thought and execution’ of a historic environment, an approach that involves the acceptance of the concept of change, as long as the original, cultural characteristics of these places are left unaltered