Patrimonio, città storiche e sostenibilità

This paper links the notions of cultural heritage and historical city with that of sustainable development, in the light of the most recent documents elaborated by the United Nations. In particular, we start from the definition of historical city as contained in the Washington Charter of 1987 to correlate its contents to the “historic urban landscape” proposed by UNESCO in 2011. Therefore, we try to understand the role assigned to cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, in the promotion of the sustainable development of the city and the territory within the context of the Agenda 2030 and the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations, also in the view of some reflections by ICOMOS. In this perspective, the paper highlights the implications of urban regeneration and the opportunity to use new integrated approaches and multidimensional tools for the ex-ante and ex-post evaluation of actions on the historical urban landscape, also suggesting the need for the construction of a database, at local and national level, for monitoring the pursuit of sustainability objectives.