Patrimoni contesi e terre di confine: il confine come lente per leggere la storia urbana

Historically, cities have been shaped by various forms of boundary lines: some physical and impenetrable, such as defensive city walls; others non-physical yet equally powerful, such as those that separated the city from the countryside. The concept of the border has evolved over time, expanding beyond its initial geographical conception to encompass social, political, cultural, and psychological dimensions of territory – a condition most evident in borderlands marked by conflict. These transitional spaces often bear both the material and immaterial traces of wars, forced displacements, and unresolved memories. From a historical-urban perspective, the border constitutes a privileged vantage point from which to examine how cities absorb, reinterpret, or erase difficult legacies of the past. Assuming the border as a lens for reading urban and territorial history, and drawing on selected case studies, this paper analyses borders both as causes and consequences of conflict. It investigates the link between conflict-related heritage and borderlands, and vice versa, and explore the role of tourism in understanding, communicating, and enhancing contested heritage in these areas. It also considers border regions in a state of “in-betweenness”, where no measures have been implemented; these unresolved sites represent a fertile ground to test and develop models of conscious tourism, capable of transforming dissonant heritage into space of history interpretation, social cohesion and public engagement.