Energy Communities for the Decarbonization of Historical Villages: A Case Study in Italy

The paper focuses on Historical Villages, a precious segment of European cultural identity heritage characterized by fragile environments that, over the last decade, have experienced a progressive rapid decay. Historical Villages are urban aggregates often located in marginal areas, frequently abandoned due to their complex orography, their fragile economy, and high environmental risks. These features led them to progressively face depopulation phenomena, unemployment, and ageing of the population, which, in turn, caused growing socio-economic issues and the degradation of buildings and infrastructure. There is a need to generate initiatives to protect the memory and heritage of former communities and residents. Renovation strategies are crucial to avoid the depopulation of HVs, therefore, the valorisation of small towns is a vast field upon which a new idea of conservation and regeneration can be based, producing added value, attractiveness, growth, and rebirth in contexts that are undergoing a degradation process. The main content of this paper pertains to the proposal of a set of adaptive reuse, decarbonization, and renovation strategies, including the creation of energy communities, aimed at preserving their heritage value and enhancing their historical identity. A new methodological framework will be introduced, incorporating appropriate and complementary actions at the urban, architectural, and building technology scales to reduce environmental impact, improve building energy efficiency, resilience, and enhance users' comfort. An inventory of potential measures, subdivided into intervention categories, will be proposed starting from the landscape/urban scale, such as widespread interventions aimed at improving the accessibility of HVs. Then, at the building scale, energy retrofit solutions for envelope, comprehending new advanced components, such as photovoltaic roof tiles or Nature Based Solutions. Finally, to promote a model of renovation and reuse with the inclusion of new suitable functions, an Italian best-practices case study, The CommOn Light Energy Community located in the Municipality of Ferla, Sicily, is presented.