Abstract
Searching for renovating and/or constructing quiet areas in historical urban sites, along with the conservation and valorization policies of the tangible and intangible value of historic urban sites are goals that can be combined into a unique sustainable strategy for the preservation of the sense of place and identity of communities as well as their well-being. Historic cloisters and courtyards are examples of such sites. Due to their physical, architectural, environmental and cultural features, they present restorative capabilities that could qualify them as quite areas. This paper aims to establish a new procedure that, through the exploration and analysis of past and current aspects of these sites, makes it possible to classify them and understand whether they still preserve a restorative character. A graphic representation, obtained from a historical analysis and an objective description of past and current historical/architectural, environmental and cultural scenarios, has been used. The results were compared with those of the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS-11). A diamond shape represents highly restorative sites, while deviations from this shape were found to be weakly correlated with a restorative nature. This has also been shown by the high positive correlation of analytical parameters with the PRS-11 score and, in particular, with the component of Fascination.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, governments, agencies and scientific and technical communities have paid a deal of significant attention to the management of, and reducing noise pollution in, densely populated cities
It is expected that a wide “Diamond” shape of this representation will be well correlated to the restorative sites
The History/Architecture, Environment and Activities characteristics were collected through specific forms, that experts used during their exploration and analysis of the sites
Summary
Over the last two decades, governments, agencies and scientific and technical communities have paid a deal of significant attention to the management of, and reducing noise pollution in, densely populated cities. Searching for, renovating and/or building and making available, new quiet areas for people who live in densely populated cities are important significant goals and challenges for both public and private, stakeholders, who must pay more attention to the implementation of sustainable policies that satisfy the environmental and quality-of-life requirements of the citizens. To achieve these goals, a great deal of study in the field of environmental acoustics have focused on the characterization and preservation of the soundscapes of these areas [4,5,6], along with an analysis of the factors which can modulate well-being [7]. For the first aspect, following Schafer’s ideas [8,9], the soundscape approach identifies the acoustic environment according to acoustic measurements (e.g., SPLs, spectral content, and time-variation) and to how it is perceived by individuals according to several dimensions (e.g., pleasantness and eventfulness [10])
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