A Pathway from Research-Action-Research to Integrated Management Plan

In ROCK, cultural heritage is meant as a unique and powerful engine of regeneration and sustainable development but also of economic growth, starting from local assets and resources. ROCK Cities present a vast array of contextual values, experiences, legacies that were taken as a reference to start from, to define the on-site interventions to be implemented locally. This approach is based on a circular urban system model that implies the connection of initially separated urban “systems” - related to cultural, knowledge, green, regeneration, security, creativity dimensions. The circularity (Vernay, 2013) is strongly based on a continuous feedback loop, that shaped a research-action-research methodology (Boeri et al., 2019; Gianfrate et al., 2020), a continuous and dynamic investigation movement, in which speculation and practice, knowledge and action can never be separated. These actions entail soft and technological enabling actions: on the one hand as technical, organizational and administrative intervention, on the other they include informal and spontaneous inputs. This is an approach that worked with the city as if it was a real laboratory, hosting micro scale experiments, pop-up architectural interventions, small installations, unconventional uses of public spaces and alternative proposals for cultural events in the city.