Centri storici tra città del mercato e città dei cittadini

In the last few years, historical centres have witnessed a new centrality both in scientific and political- administrative terms, not only as essential parts of the city, nor even as fundamental keys to understanding the broader urban and territorial dynamics, but above all because they constitute attractive "objects" for urban marketing strategies. The cities have long considered tourism as a fundamental opportunity for economic gain, and have particularly valued the historical centres in which a large majority of monuments and objects of greatest artistic and architectural interest are concentrated. The profound changes that have characterized the increasingly experiential tourist phenomenon have even reinforced the great interest which developed around historical centres. These places, in fact, also condense the very identity as well as the history of the cities and offer the tourist an unprecedented emotional charge, to which no other urban space compares. This sort of "concentration" of experience opportunities has not only made the historical centres an element of great tourist attraction, but has also forced them to always remain faithful to the image of themselves consolidated by tradition and by marketing so as not to betray the expectations of the tourists themselves. The result was a process of museization, freezing, but their reduction to a "theme park" (Amendola 2015), as the processes that characterize cities like Florence and Venice clearly show. The strategic use of collective imagination thus becomes a strength of the tourist strategies for the cities and, at the same time, a critical point of the urban and social development of the historical centres (Settis 2014). When history is reduced to an object to be sold on the market and therefore simplified to make it immediately usable, the city ends up coinciding with the image of itself and ceases to represent a field of experience for its citizens. Hence, more than any other urban site, historical centres are divided and disputed between the city of market and that of citizens (Emerson, Smiley 2018), between the city that is redefined, rewrites itself or remains immobile to make itself attractive for its tourists, and what it knows and can be a place of growth and experience for its inhabitants. The historical centres ceases to be experienced by its historical residents, pushed out both by the disappearance of the nearby shops and by the traditional meeting points that they become under the weight of the tourist potential, and by the opportunity to transform the houses into more profitable B&Bs or even into luxury homes to sell to wealthy professionals or foreigners. The historical centres thus find themselves at the crossroads of a series of phenomena which, albeit contradictory like museization and gentrification, generate a dramatically coherent final effect, i.e. the acquisition of a strongly touristic section of the historical centre and at the same time the loss of its identity traits. This critical area is the space of urban regulation policies, where the possibility of a difficult and necessary mediation is played out between the needs of these different urban subjects who claim a legitimate right to the city (Lefebvre 1967).