Enhancement strategies for historic towns. A proposal for the village of San Giovanni Lipioni

In all Europe, many small and medium residential areas have to face different challenges, i.e. depopulation process due to working needs and the increasing in ageing of permanents residents, combined with the economic recession. In Italy, according to recent statistics, in a few decades about three thousand municipalities will undergo desertification processes so that their local traditions and cultural identities will be lost. The municipality of San Giovanni Lipioni is a small residential area in province of Chieti, where only 150 people live today, and it is experiencing this situation. The paper describes how knowledge dissemination and new digital technologies in the territorial analysis could help in order to widen the built heritage awareness and support the urban socio-economic development. The strategy herein proposed consists of an expeditious survey of the urban routes by shooting and filming the small residential centre using drones and action cameras, creating a system of virtual itineraries that allows a full immersion in the village context, accessible by using web platforms. Moreover, the state of conservation of a group of uninhabited buildings has been evaluated and analyzed, to elaborate synthetic factsheets about the state of preservation, construction features and other useful contents, in order to outline the interventions for functional refurbishment.