Building Heritage Materials Passports (BHMPs) for Resilient Communities

The new model of circular economy and digitalization promoted by the recent normative framework of the European Union opens new scenarios of integration between sustainable buildings and built heritage conservation that led to the emergence of a new transversal ethic of sustainability based on knowledge of materials and their circular use in construction with a leading role for the expertise of the scientific-disciplinary sector of Architectural Engineering. The building sustainability requirements and the widespread degradation of the built heritage, in many cases reduced to the state of dilapidated buildings or ruins, give to materials and building components an intrinsic value downgrading the need for the conservation of the building organism or what remains of it. Circular design offers the possibility of a reformulation of the connections between construction and the life of materials and building component that neither begins nor ends with their use in buildings or specific locations. On the contrary, the reuse of heritage materials and building components can transform the loss of construction into a potential gain in a continuous history of use, deconstruction, and reuse. The paper focuses on the study of the state-of-the-art on Materials Passports with the objectives of the development of Building Heritage Materials Passports (BHMPs) for the recovery of materials and building component belonging to dilapidated built heritage in the inner areas of the Basilicata region, the rediscovery of local buildings technologies and their recognition by communities as common goods and inexhaustible resources. By leveraging the sustainability of the ancient ways of building and inhabiting places, the paper promotes “care actions” of tangible and intangible building heritage with the involvement of communities in Living Labs able to strengthen the resilience to abrupt climate change, transforming needs into opportunities for sustainable development.