3D Mapping for Urban Regeneration and Sustainable Tourism: The Astino Valley and Monastery in Bergamo

Urban regeneration projects constitute new opportunities for landscape enhancement and environmental conservation as a basis for promoting sustainable forms of tourism. This essay presents a regeneration process underway in the Astino Valley and Monastery in Bergamo, an area that, after the National Landscape Award of the Italian Ministry of Culture, in 2021 was granted the Landscape Award of the Council of Europe. During the last fifteen years, the Astino Valley and Monastery area were interested in an important urban regeneration action based on a strict interaction between the public and private actors, with the support of the university and the involvement of local inhabitants. This action underlined its landscape value and environmental richness coming from a traditionally respectful relationship between local communities and natural resources within the area that became protected in the 1970s as the Bergamo Hills Regional Park (Parco Regionale dei Colli di Bergamo). Today this valley is an excellent urban periphery and an interesting place to experiment sustainable tourism approaches based on the respect for the inhabitants’ cultural identity and social values. In this context a three-dimensional mapping system is a challenging tool for the promotion of sustainable tourism practices as it can render the precious landscape and environmental richness of the area, and it can be a realistic georeferenced virtual platform for the interaction among tourists and the other local stakeholders – contributing to a more conscious and shared place-fruition.