The overall aim of this research is to investigate the cultural dimension of sustainable development. To this aim, the project highlights the critical role of culture in socio-economic post-pandemic recovery and its potential in driving change to build a high quality, socially integrated and sustainable environment. The focus is on the recent concept of Baukultur, a German expression that places culture at the centre of a path of construction and reconstruction of the physical city and community. Baukultur is intended as a strategy and collective action to activate growth processes, promote development strategies, pursue the common good, and ensure a high quality of urban life. Based on these considerations, this research analyses, from an international and comparative perspective, how European cities are generating new approaches to these processes. It investigates through the analysis of specific case studies in Rome, Berlin and Paris, representing a variety of territorial specific cultural models, how participative culture, cultural heritage, and more generally, creativity can contribute to sustainable urban development. The research investigates strategies and practices realized with the involvement of different actors and the implementation of small-scale interventions that can successfully transform public spaces into catalysts of new processes of urban regeneration. Their effects range from tangible economic and environmental benefits to intangible benefits, such as place identity and social cohesion. Reshaping and planning the contemporary city with a culture-centred approach seems to be an effective way to give meaning and function to the existent, acting on the present, to develop a better future.
