Ignacy Waleski (p), Zbigniew Przygodzki

Eleni Linaki

Cultural heritage, as a civilizational achievement of mankind, means a value that determines the culture and history of each region, country or continent. Recognition of a country's cultural heritage as heritage is discretionary and may also be interpreted in various ways. In the case of undisputed world-class or regional objects, recognition as a monument is not a problem. The recognition as monuments of those that evoke ambiguous emotional associations (resources defined in the literature as dissonant heritage), resulting e.g. from the nation's shameful history, authoritarianism, or fratricidal wars may be difficult to estimate. In the case of heritage of an undisputed position and character, such monuments constitute a significant value for humankind, regardless of their culture, place of residence or professed religion.
This paper focuses on examining the Polish socialist- modernism dissonant cultural heritage. This relatively young resource, created in the times of real socialism, still evokes a lot of emotions in Polish public discourse. Historical impurities mean that for many Poles it is not yet fully qualified as a historical resource (valuable and worth protecting). As a result, many buildings are not properly managed, while others disappear irretrievably from the image of cities. The aim of this article is to identify the potential of the remaining resource from this period in third tier cities, as well as to define the functional and morphological characteristics of these facilities. The classification of this type of objects will be specified in terms of qualitative features, and the general; historical and cultural characteristics of the resource emerging in the times of real socialism.

Carolina Foglia (p), Maria Laura Parisi, Nicola Pontarollo

Ignacy Waleski

Nowadays, most of the global population lives in urban areas, thus, the impact of cities on our future is increasingly recognised. The weight of this trend affects both the economic, social and environmental development of the European Union, as Eurostat figures show that 40.4% of the EU-28 population lived in cities in 2015. As a consequence, the European Commission earlier recognized the role that cities play in the lives of many inhabitants and has committed itself to act in this area. In fact, it has monitored the quality of life in European cities since 2004 through a perception survey investigating several issues concerning cities' liveability by gathering the experiences of citizens. On the basis of people’ opinion on various aspects of their living conditions, we develop a composite indicator named European Cities Liveability Index (ECLI), based on cities’ services, urban environment, affordability, amenities, and sociality. This indicator ranks the performance of urban areas over time, monitoring and exploring the possible reasons for their changes. Furthermore, provided that social and personal needs change with the different phases of life, we construct an age-based ECLI for different age groups, with the purpose of evaluating whether and how cities’ liveability perceptions vary, accordingly. The use of this indicator provides insights of a decade of urban development in European countries, paving the way for future scenarios that are the concern of policy makers, researchers and urban planners.

Eleni Linaki (p), Konstantinos Serraos

Carolina Foglia

The research project refers to cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible , and attempts to broaden the current knowledge about decision-making multicriteria systems and especially multicriteria systems in cultural heritage, as recently become a vital factor in cultural heritage. This paper aims to develop an innovative decision-making method which evaluates the cultural significance of the cultural assets of a place. In this framework, other criteria—such as social or even environmental criteria—are excluded. As the literature shows, previous studies failed to address a common evaluation framework and a holistic approach in multicriteria evaluation of cultural assets of a place. These new findings reveal the national and international research gap, and the emergence a new innovative approach for the protection, recording and evaluation of cultural heritage. Multicriteria decision-making systems have become important in this field in terms of protection and conservation. Especially for intangible cultural heritage, due to the fragile nature of its assets (oral, folklore, etc.), recording and evaluation are the first steps which could ensure conservation and the protection. After an extended literature review, the paper proceeds to the construction of the multicriteria decision-making system and provides the framework for a new way to classify and rank the cultural assets of a place by their cultural significance.