The National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) is a public policy designed to tackle depopulation in inner areas, defined according to the distance from centers offering essential services. Such a policy’s success is crucial to address the new challenges for planning brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this sense, there is a need to adequately support its implementation by providing handy decision support tools, understanding the power balances among municipalities, and defining proper interventions. The Indicator Grid, already used by the SNAI for project areas selection, can answer this need. However, the Grid’s application to support public policy at the municipality level requires reviewing some of its features, such as the indicators’ large number and the impossibility of defining some of them at the municipal scale. Based on these premises, this paper aims at supporting inner areas policies by carrying out a critical analysis of the current SNAI Grid, aimed at improving its effectiveness. It relies on a hybrid methodology that merges qualitative data interpretations and statistical analyses. Thanks to this method, defining a parsimonious Grid by leaving its complexity and information level untouched is possible. The so-defined set of indicators can represent a valuable reference tool in pinpointing priorities for actions or selecting further territorial scopes from the SNAI perspective, even if it still brings some criticalities to be faced.

In the last decades, the growing concern about land consumption, together with the awareness about cultural heritage’s key role for sustainable development, has led to greater attention to cultural property reuse as a conscious process of new values production. However, decisions about heritage bring a high degree of complexity, related to the need to preserve properties’ values and fulfill protection legislation, thus bringing high cost, which discourages public and private investments for reuse interventions. In this context, it becomes urgent to support reuse decisions through proper evaluation methodologies that, dealing with the complexity of interests at stake, allow individuals to assess the financial sustainability of conscious cultural heritage reuse projects. For these reasons, the paper proposes a methodological framework that, grounded on the recognition of cultural properties’ values and their possible integration in the local economic system, assesses reuse projects’ financial sustainability. This methodology’s application is discussed through a case study, represented by a project for a historical rural landscape in Pantelleria island. The application to the case study allows us to discuss the role of the proposed evaluation framework in supporting and promoting cultural heritage reuse and its possible room for improvement.

In the last decades, the emergence of new social, environmental, and economic demands, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has led urban planning to innovate its themes, methods, and approaches. In this context, temporary urbanism has emerged as a mainstream approach. How-ever, the impacts of temporary approaches to urban planning are far from being fully understood. In this light, this study focuses on one of the mainstream approaches to temporary urbanism, tactical urbanism, and tries to understand its economic impacts on contemporary cities. Indeed, despite the growing interest in tactical urbanism interventions and their value as an urban regeneration tool, there are no specific reflections focused on investigating their economic effects. Based on these premises, this paper focuses on different tactical urbanism experiences in the Italian context and tries to assess the economic impacts of tactical urbanism interventions by adopting the lens of real estate values as a suitable proxy when dealing with urban environments. The first obtained results show that the experiences of tactical urbanism, partly because of their temporary nature and their tendency toward minimal intervention, fail to trigger regeneration processes or produce significant economic impacts on the territory. Instead, such experiences can play a role in accelerating or consolidating urban regeneration processes already underway, and, in this sense, they contribute to the generation of economic impact on the territory.

In recent decades, the debate concerning the conservation of built heritage has begun to acknowledge the benefits of involving local communities in this process. Despite this recognition, however, the role played by local communities in heritage affairs in practice remains marginal, and the idea of ‘heritage communities’ proposed by the Faro Convention has not yet become a reality. An effective change in this paradigm that focuses on identifying local communities as focal entities in the process of the conservation of built heritage must involve a recognition of their heritage resources and, thus, the availability of appropriate value bases that can help local communities recognise the social value of built heritage assets. Indeed, this value dimension continues to be viewed as less notable than other values that have been recognised as ‘essential’ with respect to conservation. In light of these premises, this paper aims to overcome existing differences and conflicts in the discourse concerning heritage social value by providing a comprehensive framework of value types that can guide efforts to assess the social value of built heritage. In this sense, a multidisciplinary review and investigation of different theoretical domains that have addressed the topic of social value are proposed. Such an investigation can provide a basic reference for efforts to overcome this gap and explore the influences, connections, and contradictions that occur among different disciplines, thus providing a comprehensive theoretical framework in this context. Finally, the paper discusses various opportunities, limitations, and future challenges pertaining to efforts to identify the social value of built heritage as the core of decision processes concerning conservation.