The urban landscape and its social representation. A cognitive research approach to rethinking historical cultural identities.

On the one hand, space is built according to a top-down development approach, on the other, it is the result of informal, bottom-up activities of everyday life. The cultural heritage to preserve is, therefore, a melted contribution both of professional planners and spontaneous behaviors of citizens, city-users, and tourists, directly involved or unaware of the co-design role played. Nevertheless, all these actors contribute to defining the social and future identity of the place. The paper presents a cognitive research approach, borrowed from environmental psychology, to discover the “social images of the city” with the purpose of preserving and enhancing its cultural heritage. The methodology of the user and representative testing is presented and discussed using experimental case studies developed in the Italian territory at different scales