Urban Maintenance: A Strategy for Sustainability

The attention paid to the theme of urban care and maintenance represents one of the most significant acquisitions of contemporary post-industrial culture, more and more oriented towards sustainability objectives. The theme of urban maintenance represents a real strategy for the built environment sustainability; indeed, it constitutes the first tool to understand and govern the complexity and heterogeneity characterising contemporary city, a means through which to pursue the system dependability as well as the sustainability regulating lifetime dimension. The present contribution wants to be an opportunity for reflecting upon the technological culture of maintenance project, whose disciplinary debate is how to apply such a discipline not only on a building scale but also on an urban one. Indeed, the methods and tools for projecting and managing the urban organism, intended as a complex unitary system, can’t be the same as those used in sub-systems and urban components, but these methods have to be strategic tools which help municipal managers and citizens to “decide how to decide”. It is then necessary to pursue an integrated approach which, by overcoming a logic of technical management simply intended as a part summation, can achieve systemic operational modes.