Chiara Mariotti

While the Covid-19 pandemic crisis has put many tangible and intangible heritage practices on hold, suspending rituals and traditions and freezing actions and programs on the built environment with major consequences for the social and cultural life of communities, it has also brought general attention back to the issue of care by boosting heritage-led enhancement tactics for historic cities in transition. In other words, the idea that the management of our ever-changing environment, especially in times of crisis, could be governed through the conscious management of its heritage gained more and more ground. Starting from this assumption, as part of the CARE symposium, the presentation discusses an ongoing enhancement action that the Department of Construction, Civil Engineering and Architecture of the Università Politecnica delle Marche is developing together with the interdepartmental Lab on Digital Cultural Heritage, DiStoRi. The action focuses on the Church of San Francesco in the historic city center of Fano, which has been roofless for a century and since then has become in a unique but unused urban void closed to the public. Prompted by the impacts of the pandemic that have highlighted the value of open urban spaces for communities and the importance of new creative and collective practices of preservation, we are developing a pilot digital tool to reverse the current trend in that portion of the city. The operation has a twofold aim: to return that urban void to citizens by telling its history and architectural transformations, and to provide an instrument for the implementation of Preventive Conservation Plans able to support the mid- to long-term heritage management as well as scenarios of adaptive reuse. In this perspective, the research deals with the theme care as a cultural, social but also very technical issue, combining conservation, management, physical and digital accessibility.