Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the cross-fertilisation process between the concept of resilience and building conservation. The authors discuss how the conservation field can address new issues posed by climate change and whether the concept of resilience plays a role within the framework of sustainable building conservation.Design/methodology/approach: Starting from the use of resilience as a “travelling concept”, different interpretations of the term emerging from different fields are compared and interrelated in order to understand how this concept can impact future research in building conservation.Findings: In addition to summarising recent developments in conservation theory with a special focus on how sustainability has influenced the field, this work also suggests some lines of research where resilience could foster interdisciplinary approaches to building conservation and presents some controversial outcomes.Originality/value: The paper raises a discussion on how the concept of resilience could renew the field of building conservation, helping contemporary society to address the challenges of climate change.

This paper presents a research to balance building conservation, users’ comfort and energy efficiency of a masterpiece of XX century architecture. The Urbino University Colleges were designed by architect Giancarlo de Carlo and built since 1962 to 1983 beside the Renaissance city. They host more than 1,000 students within 5 dormitories and 62,000 m2 surface. Authors discuss some outcomes from the “Keeping it modern” research program financed by the Getty Foundation in 2016, which aims at providing the Colleges with a sustainable conservation plan. The goal is to lower heating and operational costs to allow funds in conservation activities. Specific issues regard: the striking dimensions of the complex, the constructive features (brickwork walls, exposed concrete structures, single-glazed windows) and the lack of data about the hygrothermal performances.\ud The research thus includes a hygrothermal analysis, a proposal for the energy retrofitting, a building-HVAC model, a test on a pilot site. Authors have monitored surface temperatures, indoor air temperature and humidity for one year, even mapping their distribution through a digital psychrometer. Thermal imaging has been used to detect heat losses, thermal bridges and heat gains due to the solar radiation. Data have fed a building-HVAC model, which was a reference to design an appropriate strategy for retrofitting and improving the energy efficiency of the complex. Some solutions are being implemented on a pilot site. The building performances before and after retrofitting are compared.\ud Results provide indications to merge conservation and sustainability of a XX century heritage building.\ud In conclusion, the solid knowledge of each case confirms being required to support a retrofit proposal of a heritage building, moreover in case of a XX century building, as the cultural value of such a huge heritage is often disregarded to improve its energy performance

This article-framed as a methodological contribution and at the intersection between the critical urban, urban political ecology and world-ecology disciplines-builds on Corboz's metaphor of 'territory as a palimpsest' to explore the representation of the socio-economic and ecological processes underpinning uneven development under extractive capitalist urbanization. While the palimpsest approach has typically been used to map transformations of more traditional urban morphologies, this work focuses instead on remote extraction territories appropriated by the global economy and integral to planetary urbanization. The article suggests the central notion of 'palimpsests of appropriation' as a lens to map the extraction processes. It does so in its multi-scalar and temporal dimensions and on the basis of the three intertwined frames-i.e., the productive, distribution and mediation palimpsest-shortly exemplifying its use on the ground for the iron ore extraction territory in the Swedish-Norwegian Arctic. With this, the article contributes to the development of an expanded representational methodology and conception of territories of extraction-where social and natural production are brought together-illustrating how appropriation has been (re)shaping each of the frames throughout historical thresholds, but also how socio-natures are being (re)made in its image.