The circular city is emerging as new concept and form of practice in sustainable urban development. This is a response to the complex and pressing challenges of urbanization, as highlighted in the New Urban Agenda (NUA). The concept of a “circular city” or “circular city-region” derives from the circular economy model applied in the spatial territorial dimension. It can be associated with the concept of a “self-sustainable” regenerative city, as stated in paragraph n.71 of the NUA. This paper aims to develop an extensive form of “screening” of circular economy actions in emerging circular cities, focusing on eight European historic port cities self-defined as “circular”. The analysis is carried out as a review of circular economy actions in the selected cities, and specifically aims to identify the key areas of implementation in which the investments in the circular economy are more oriented, as well as to analyze the spatial implications of the reuse of buildings and sites, proposing a set of criteria and indicators for ex-ante and ex-post evaluations and monitoring of circular cities. Results show that the built environment (including cultural heritage), energy and mobility, waste management, water management, industrial production (including plastics, textiles, and industry 4.0 and circular design), agri-food, and citizens and communities can be adopted as strategic areas of implementation of the circular city model in historic cities, highlighting a lack of indicators in some sectors and identifying a possible framework for “closed” urban metabolism evaluation from a life-cycle perspective, focusing on evaluation criteria and indicators in the (historic) built environment.

Cultural heritage is, today, particularly exposed to the devastation resulting from natural phenomena, but it is even more exposed to the destruction caused by man-made ones. Consequently, it is critical to adopt suitable and concrete provisions for its preservation and conservation. The conflict that has been raging in Ukraine since February 2022 has spotlighted problems related to cultural heritage, which is increasingly considered a military target. Digital transformation and technologies integrated with legal tools can contribute to making the system of protection and recovery of cultural assets more effective and efficient by redefining methodologies to safeguard and interact with them. This paper proposes a framework for integrating legal and digital tools that are functional for the preservation, conservation, and enhancement of cultural heritage. To define it, on the one hand, the legal instruments in force were analysed, and on the other, a literature review on the digital technologies currently available was carried out. The role of digital transformation in the cultural sphere was also examined, especially in light of Ukraine’s experience with the application of digital technologies to protect and recover cultural heritage during the current conflict.

As climate change accelerates, urban areas are becoming increasingly inhospitable, with rising heat island effects and overall unhealthy environmental conditions. In this context, historic villages, due to their proximity to nature and lower population density, can represent a valuable alternative to unsustainable urban areas, providing better quality of life (i.e., through healthier environment, better work–life balance). They are “populated” by historic buildings characterized by high cultural value but are often in a state of abandonment. Nowadays, the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage represents an efficient strategy to adapt it to new needs/requirements and, at the same time, to preserve its historical and intrinsic values for present and future generations. In this framework, this study proposes a multidimensional evaluation framework for assessing cultural heritage adaptive reuse projects, covering all sustainability dimensions and capturing both tangible and intangible values. This framework, consisting of multiple criteria and multidimensional indicators, has been applied to evaluate alternative scenarios related to the regeneration of the abandoned Seminary in Sant’Agata de’ Goti (historic village), Benevento, Italy. In particular, three different scenarios have been evaluated by the SOCRATES (SOcial multi Criteria Assessment of European policies) method, a multicriteria decision method developed by the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission.

The challenges of sustainable development are mainly concentrated in the cities. Therefore, they represent a key place for implementing strategies and actions to achieve (or not achieve) sustainable development objectives. In this perspective, the circular city model represents a new way of organizing the city. As demonstrated by a variety of best practices, the entry points for triggering circular processes at the urban scale are various. In this paper, cultural heritage is presented as the entry point for the implementation of this new urban development model. The focus here is on the implementation tools, with a particular emphasis on the evaluation tools for assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of this model, that is, the multidimensional benefits that it can produce. The Level(s) tool, proposed by the European Commission in 2017, is the only officially recognised assessment tool related to the circular economy at the European level. It aims to evaluate the performance of new buildings from a circular economy perspective. This paper intends to expand the field of action of the aforementioned tool to projects related to cultural heritage. Nevertheless, the Level(s) tool has some weaknesses in relation to values and attributes that need to be considered when dealing with cultural heritage. This paper proposes an evaluation framework for assessing cultural heritage renovation and reuse projects, considering all its values and the multidimensional impacts that they are able to produce (economic, social, environmental impacts) in the city. The starting point for the development of the proposed evaluation framework is the Level(s) tool by the European Commission. On the basis of critical considerations, this tool is integrated with criteria and indicators deduced from other previous studies and other official tools on this issue (Green Building Council and Heritage Impact Assessment tools). The evaluation framework is here tested to evaluate the renovation/reuse project of Villa Vannucchi, a historic building located in the city of San Giorgio a Cremano in the metropolitan city of Naples (Italy).

The built environment sector is one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions and resource depletion that contributes to the climate change crisis. The European Commission, in the “Green New Deal”, highlights that the sustainable regeneration/requalification of existing buildings plays a fundamental role to maximize the objective of decarbonization and resource conservation for 2050. The aim of this study was to understand how historic buildings’ energy retrofit projects can contribute to achieve this goal. In this study, we made a life cycle assessment to evaluate an energy retrofit project of Villa Vannucchi, an historic building located in San Giorgio a Cremano (Naples). The results of this application showed that the use of hemp material, for walls’ thermal insulation, significantly reduces the percentage of environmental impacts in the entire material life cycle (compared with traditional materials). This was because the plant removes a significant percentage of CO₂ already from the atmosphere when it is growing. In conclusion, the assessment of different design scenarios that promote the use of innovative technologies and materials can be of high utility to designers to compare and choose efficient solutions for the sustainable/circular renovation of historic buildings.