Historical Cloisters and Courtyards as Quiet Areas

Massimiliano Masullo, Francesca Castanò, Roxana Adina Toma and Luigi Maffei
Additional contact information
Massimiliano Masullo: Department of Architecture and Industrial Design, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, 81031 Aversa (CE), Italy
Francesca Castanò: Department of Architecture and Industrial Design, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, 81031 Aversa (CE), Italy
Roxana Adina Toma: Department of Architecture and Industrial Design, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, 81031 Aversa (CE), Italy
Luigi Maffei: Department of Architecture and Industrial Design, Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, 81031 Aversa (CE), Italy

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-21

Abstract: Searching for renovating and/or constructing quiet areas in historical urban sites, along with the conservation and valorization policies of the tangible and intangible value of historic urban sites are goals that can be combined into a unique sustainable strategy for the preservation of the sense of place and identity of communities as well as their well-being. Historic cloisters and courtyards are examples of such sites. Due to their physical, architectural, environmental and cultural features, they present restorative capabilities that could qualify them as quite areas. This paper aims to establish a new procedure that, through the exploration and analysis of past and current aspects of these sites, makes it possible to classify them and understand whether they still preserve a restorative character. A graphic representation, obtained from a historical analysis and an objective description of past and current historical/architectural, environmental and cultural scenarios, has been used. The results were compared with those of the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS-11). A diamond shape represents highly restorative sites, while deviations from this shape were found to be weakly correlated with a restorative nature. This has also been shown by the high positive correlation of analytical parameters with the PRS-11 score and, in particular, with the component of Fascination.

Keywords: cloisters 1; courtyards 2; quiet areas 3; soundscape 4; restorativeness 5; preservations 6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2887/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2887/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:7:p:2887-:d:341523

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().