The Role of Historical City Centers in the Climate-Neutral Transition of Cities: The Digital Twin as a Tool for Dynamic and Participatory Planning

The historic center of European cities shows great transformative potential: it catalyzes collective interests while being characterized by specific challenges related to the balance between conservation, mitigation, and adaptation in a climate- resilient perspective. Digital technologies play an enabling role in this plural scenario of actors and approaches: they allow to monitor the energy performance of heritage buildings, to collect information in real time about their reaction to climate change, and to simulate adaptive transformations of such buildings. The implementation of technologies on the historic center (sensors, simulation, and management platforms) allows to generate, store, monitor, and communicate data that help intervene effectively in domains such as air quality, heat waves, and heritage’s energy performance, proposing mitigating strategies and evaluating its effect in a scenario-building perspective. In the eld of technologies applied to urban systems, urban digital twins represent an evolving frontier by virtue of their ability to respond in real time to the complex problems of the urban infrastructure and to optimize it through predictive mechanisms. European policies for the twin transition, ecological and digital, are putting a stress on the people-centric approach which remains, up to today, an unresolved challenge of digital twins, which are still not able to incorporate the social, cultural, and human component in an adequate way. The present contribution will investigate the future trajectories for the integration of co- design actions on heritage and digital twins with a twofold focus: on technologies and capabilities and on the hybrid role of digital twins as support to the transition of the historic center and lever for the reinterpretation of the historic center itself as a laboratory for collective research, experimenting adaptive solutions in response to climate and environmental risks.