Historic River Cities. Heritage strategies for the cultural landscape of the Oreto river in Palermo

The history of port cities has certainly been influenced by their relationship with the sea or navigable waterways, which have determined their development and, in particular, the genesis of districts with a purely commercial or productive vocation. The cities of Porto and Palermo are certainly two comparable case studies, since they both share the existence of large commercial and productive neighbourhoods, in relation to the sea or river, in which important monumental buildings alternate with commercial or productive areas. The related recovery processes on the one hand have allowed the restoration of many monumental buildings, but on the other they have triggered phenomena of gentrification or loss of identity, leading moreover to difficult social divisions, between the local inhabitants and the new more affluent population, attracted to inhabit the recovered buildings, revalued on the real estate market. Restoration is called upon today, in the context of these not always virtuous processes, to be the interpreter, within holistic and participatory strategies, of the values of conservation while guaranteeing a social inclusion that takes into account the new demands of contemporaneity, in the renewed framework of historical urban landscapes (HUL 2011).