Rural areas in Europe host more than 55% of the overall population and embed a unique and peculiar cultural and natural heritage. Nevertheless, they are facing common issues of disengagement, depopulation and economic and social crises. Rural communities are increasingly interested in setting up inclusive and participatory regeneration processes, but participatory planning experiences in rural areas are still limited. This paper introduces the Community-based Heritage Management and Planning methodology (CHMP) developed within the RURITAGE project, and analyzes and presents the results of its implementation in six demonstrators around Europe and beyond. The methodology is based on the establishment of Rural Heritage Hubs (RHH), intended as the community of local stakeholders and a physical place to run the co-creation activities. We used four types of feedback—online survey, in-presence survey, consultations and interviews with RHH Coordinators—to analyze the implementation of the CHMP. The research findings show that through built capital (RHH places activated) and through the activation of local social and human capitals (RHH communities engaged in the process), participatory processes can attract local communities and engage them into the development and the implementation of local regeneration plans, fostering heritage ownership and inclusion.

As increasingly recognized by scholars, climate change is posing new challenges in the field of disaster risk management and urban planning. Even though cultural heritage has passed through decades and centuries, it has never experienced such unexpected and variable events as those forecasted by climate change for the foreseeable future, making it a sensitive element of the living environment. By selecting the city of Ravenna and the cultural heritage site of the Santa Croce Church and archaeological area as a case study, the paper aims at providing an insight into the role that urban planning tools have when it comes to improving the resilience of historical areas, coping with climate change through improvements to the disaster risk management of cultural heritage. Starting from a deep analysis of the existing spatial and urban planning tools that operate at different scales on the Ravenna territory, the adaptive capacity of the historical area toward the identified risks was assessed. The results may lead, on the one hand, to improving the integration of cultural heritage risk management into urban planning tools; on the other hand, they contribute to improving the scope and the governance of the heritage management plans in order to cope with climate change risks and their effects.

Although the need to protect and draw upon the various benefits of heritage as an asset for resilience is nowadays more clearly highlighted than in the past, policies to protect heritage from disaster risk remain fragmented, while the importance of learning from heritage and existing knowledge for building resilience is underestimated. The aim of this study is to provide an insight on good practices dealing with cultural heritage when it comes to disaster risk management and climate change adaptation, aiming at increasing cultural heritage resilience of historical areas. To this aim, the paper applies the best practice research methodology for investigating cultural heritage resilience in historical areas through the codification and analysis of good practices collected from EU-funded projects. The results consist of more than 90 good practices reviewed and analyzed according to a set of criteria. The research findings, organized according to three main categories (i.e., institutional, structural/physical, social), contribute to emphasizing the importance of improving knowledge from already available good practices. Two main approaches have been highlighted in the discussion, according to the key role assigned to stakeholders, education, data, and technology. The results allow to take advantage of existing knowledge to support communities to increase resilience of cultural heritage in historical areas.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is an inclusive approach to the research and innovation process. Regional and local authorities are encouraged to take advantages of RRI in order to address the complexity of the interplay between science and society, especially as it affects territorial development policies. However, adopting the RRI approach is not an immediate or linear process. Consciously or not, many territories have already adopted policies and planning instruments that incorporate RRI, generating effects on the spatial scales. The aim of this study is to provide a methodology to map the inclusion of RRI dimensions (i.e., public engagement, open access, gender, ethics, science education) into regional development policies and spatial planning instruments, in order to detect integrated strategies and elements that are sustainable, open, inclusive, anticipative and responsive. The mapping methodology has been applied to three territorial pilot cases. The results provide the territories with a baseline to improve the integration of the RRI approach in their commitments to develop self-sustaining research and innovation ecosystems. Through the lessons learnt from the pilot cases, recommendations are drawn for the integration of RRI in spatial and urban planning policies and tools.

Recent seismic events and the damages related to them have highlighted the crucial role of urban planning in coping with the fragility and intrinsic vulnerability of cities. The paper presents a methodology for assessing seismic risk at an urban scale, expanding from a single-building investigation to an urban-scale analysis by adopting an empirical method for assessing the vulnerability of the urban fabric. Data collection and analysis have been conducted through the Geographic Information System (GIS). The methodology has been applied to the Italian city of Castelfranco Emilia, in the Emilia-Romagna region, where the current regional urban planning law is guiding municipalities towards the development of strategies mostly oriented toward the retrofit of the existing building stock and the overall regeneration of the urbanized territory, in accordance with the target of no net land take by 2050. The novelty of the method stands in the transposition of approaches born in the civil engineering and protection domains to the urban planning sphere, stressing the importance of developing urban planning instruments which are well-integrated with vulnerability assessments and, therefore, able to successfully incorporate risk considerations in the decision making.