Urban maintenance for sustainable cities

The attention paid to the themes of curing and maintaining represents one of the most significant acquisitions in post-industrial contemporary culture, which is more and more oriented towards sustainability objectives. The urban maintenance theme can be considered as a real strategy for built environment sustainability; indeed, it is the primary tool for gaining knowledge about and governing the complex and heterogeneous contemporary reality, through which we can achieve system reliability, as well as sustainability regulating the life dimension. This contribution becomes an opportunity for reflecting within the technological culture of a maintenance project whose disciplinary discussion is today based on the application modes of such a discipline at both a building and an urban scale. Indeed, the methods and instruments for programming and maintaining the urban organism – intended as a complex unit system – cannot be those ones used for sub-systems and urban components; they have to be strategic instruments that are able to help managers and citizens to “decide how to decide”. It is necessary to reach an integrated approach that, overcoming the logic of a technical management intended as a mere addition of parts, reaches systemic operating modes.