Who lives heritage: investigation on the impact of tourism flows and heritage protection in the use of public space

For some time now, the protection of heritage in both urban and small towns is increasingly accompanied by economic interests due to the strong tourist flows that characterize our time. The impact of this phenomenon can be traced on several fronts: the discomforts caused by a real estate market increasingly oriented to temporary rentals, the musealization of small historic centers that, on the Italian territory, are emptying of inhabitants and filling up with seasonal tourists, unable to revive the places or to substantially reactivate the local economy. In this context, the public spaces of big cities do not avoid the consequences of mass tourism. The big cities, in fact, are affected by the problem of social separation and the migration of public life from the historical squares to the more marginal and unconfigured areas more than by the problem of depopulation. While it is true that tourism has increased the protection of heritage, it is aslo true that this protection has made the heritage, and the space in which it is placed, an object of exclusive use of the tourist himself, actually taking away the historical places from the life of the city and its inhabitants. The study, therefore, works to a theoretical reflection on the results that over the last decades the policies for heritage protection had on the use of public space and urban life, trying to compare the effects that have been observed on different urban models such as large metropolitan cities and small historic towns. The aim is to investigate the different responsibilities that contribute to the process of moving urban life away from historical and heritage sites, studying, among these, the impact of mass tourism.