Smartization in “heritage-city” management

The paper aims to depict the possible integration between cultural heritage management and smart city approach in the same context. The UNESCO provides a continuous growing list of cities to be safeguarded and in recent years lots of cities are planning and deploying smart investments to improve the quality of life for citizens and for the other stakeholders. In order to deepen the relations emerging into contexts safeguarded by UNESCO and investing to become smarter some areas combining the two perspectives are investigated in this paper through the analysis of official reports and investment plans of some cities. The evidences from three European cities favour the consideration of the need to integrate both perspectives when strategizing in cities; moreover, the role of culture is relevant in both safeguard and smartization, as it can lead to performance favouring the achievement of the three dimensions of the sustainable development. The evidences are even useful to define suggestions for city managers and to propose new research to be done to investigate in-depth the way in which cultural heritage cities can be managed and enable their smartization by levering on culture in a multi-stakeholder ecosystem.