Assessing the Economic Value of the Unmovable Cultural Assets for Improving Their Resilience: The Case Study of the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli

Abstract

AbstractCultural Heritage is exposed to many stresses and risks due to climate change, natural events, and human actions. During the last decade, the interest in risk reduction and risk assessment is getting significant attention, also for cultural assets. The current challenge is improving their resilience to safeguard and valorize them for future generations. This contribution is related to the European project of ResCult, “Increasing Resilience of Cultural heritage: a supporting decision tool for the safeguarding of cultural assets.”(2017; 2018). The present paper focuses on assessing the economic value of the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Venice, Italy) as a component of the risk assessment. The proposed contribution applies the Travel Cost Method (TCM) to evaluate the economic value of the considered cultural asset. Finally, this contribution discusses the current state of the art of risk assessment in the European context, focusing the attention on its fragmentation. Moreover, the present paper reflects on the possible implementation of the proposed method at the European scale.KeywordsCultural heritageEconomic evaluationCultural resilienceRisk assessmentTravel cost method