**5. Conclusion: A Renewed Cultural and Economic Approach to Recycle the Wasted Urban Heritage for a Sustainable Development**

The analyzed city plans clearly show that the challenge of connecting built urban heritage and sustainability is nowadays in Italy not to protect heritage as material facts—a goal already achieved thanks to a rich history of theories and actions—but to safeguard its socio-economic vitality. The failure is due not only to the mega-trends of globalization which re-structure the geography of urban hierarchy but also to the inadequacy of planning tools conceived for different socio-economic conditions.

The city plans show also that the regulation system finds it difficult to adapt to the unforeseeable and generally fast urban dynamics and to renewed cultural and economic conditions. The link between the built urban heritage and sustainability is often claimed in theory, but not taken to the operational level: The empty inner cores are not considered opportunities to reduce land consumption and recycle valuable assets.

In the Italian cultural and economic contemporary context -stagnation particularly affected the small-to-medium-sized cities since 2008- a new set of policies have to be framed together with new planning processes. A renewed cultural and economic approach must also be adopted. This task must

be accomplished in the general frame defined by the guidelines of the international institutions for conservation and heritage but with operational details suitable for the developed Countries [66,67].

The new goals of the city plans should be to:


The future phase of the research will consider cases were the decline of the city centre has been successfully dealt with in Italy and in Europe; this research will not only consider spatial planning documents but how these are part of integrated policies: In fact, the city plan alone cannot solve socio-economic issues. For this goal, the financial mechanisms and fiscal incentives for promoting the conservation of the historic centres and, at the same time, maintaining the inhabitants and the activities in the historic centre will be investigated [68,69].

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, P.P., E.M.; methodology, P.P., E.M.; resources, P.P.; data curation, P.P.; writing—original draft preparation, P.P.; writing—review and editing, P.P., E.M.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
