A GIS for knowing, managing, preserving catania’s historical architectural heritage

The historical centres of our cities represent the physical supports of the collective and contemporary memory, the attestation of the several civilizations which have left a trace of their own history. The identity elements of places make up a territory’s cultural link, a man’s psychological sense of belonging and respect to his own territory, as well as an interurban competition relating to globalization. In the perspective of creating a fundamental cognitive framework of Catania’s urban environment, the research team’s attention aimed at designing a GIS for Urban Architecture , elaborating a structure that is able to collect data inside a defined and interrelated logic archival system conceived like an open and flexible database, which can immediately be consulted and constantly implemented. Indeed, the aim of the GIS we created is to organize, manage, interrogate, visualize the peculiar aspects which characterize Catania’s architectures, as well as to create thematic charts in order to make the system able to be consultable, updatable and implementable according to each user’s cognitive path. It is a multiscale system which can be navigated through its contents (texts, drawings, 3D rendering, pictures, historical documents) thanks to multi-directional “access-windows”. A system which allows the integration of several documents in a common geo-database up to visualize the most meaningful details. Its use could assure efficacious proposals of urban transformations and congruent plans in using and/or managing heritage assets, preserving and restyling urban and environmental images, exploiting the existent heritage and territory potentialities for a sustainable city development.