Cultural Identity and Anthropized Environment: The Multidimensional Definition and Measure of the Resilience

Cultural landscapes can be interpreted as geographical spaces with high sensitivity. The pressure of urbanization, or alternatively, the abandonment of wide rural areas as a secondary consequence of the same process of urbanization, in these high fragility territories determines serious environmental crises. The high density of values, such as landscape (natural or man-made) quality of landscapes, ecosystem services production, concentrated presence of resources, is constantly threatened not only by climate change but also above all by the same urbanization processes. It can talk about ‘landscape risk’ when these urbanization processes determine changes that cause loss of identity of landscape values. Here, resilience is the ability of an ecosystem (or more precisely, a socio-ecological system) to adapt by virtuous change its internal relations and maintaining the identity values. The paper explores the potential of a method of analysis and evaluation in which, starting from the recognition of the heritage elements, the system of values are compared with the conditions of risk and degradation (due to environmental and man-made drivers) with the result of building maps of vulnerability and resilience.