Monitoring and modeling urban sprinkling: a new perspective of land take

According to the studies done until now on the recent urban transformation dynamics, namely urban sprinkling, this thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon from different points of view to bring out its unsustainable character. The urban dispersion phenomena, specific characteristic of low-density territories, will be examined through the sprinkling index by including new components in addition to the traditional settlement system components. It allows to evaluate the shape of the anthropic settlements and the distance between them which often results in fragmentation of the urban settlements which in turn generate landscape fragmentation. Nowadays, both in the proximity of large cities and in more external areas such as rural areas, there are often evidences of strong fragmentation of the anthropic settlements in which, even if the amount of occupied surface (land take) may not seem worrying, its configuration determines a general decrease in ecological connectivity, landscape quality and general degradation of soil functions. The general hypothesis is that fragmentation (of urban, landscape and habitat) can become an indicator of land take. In fact, it is not enough to consider only the loss of natural or agricultural areas, but also the distribution of buildings in the landscape matrix, i.e., its spatial component. An emblematic case is that of Basilicata region whose dynamics of transformation from the 50s to the present day will be investigated in this thesis. According to the latest report of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA 2020), the Basilicata region has only 3.15% of land consumption compared to the entire regional surface. This indicator is in contrast with the shape of the anthropic settlements which results fragmented and dispersed. It is essential that the effects of fragmentation as well as ecosystem disaggregation take on a "measurable" character, joining the list of indicators of urban and territorial quality such as land take and land consumption that European Union addresses to national communities currently consider essential and decisive to highlighting the efficiency/inefficiency of environmental and landscape management. It is crucial to understand and investigate what have been and will be in the future the most influential drivers on these dynamics that contribute intrinsically to land consumption and to define the addresses or the thresholds to contain this pulverized and disordered dissemination of anthropic settlements

City, Retail and Consumption

[Italiano]: City, Retail and Consumption si concentra sul cambiamento degli spazi urbani attraverso la chiave interpretativa offerta dal commercio e dal consumo, tra processi di globalizzazione e radicamento nei contesti locali. Il libro è stato pubblicato nel 2015 come risultato del quarto seminario internazionale sui tre temi, realizzato all'Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” dal 14 al 17 ottobre 2013 grazie al contributo di geografi di vari paesi (Brasile, Francia, Italia, Portogallo e Spagna) e arricchito da contributi di specialisti (architetti, urbanisti, ingegneri, economisti) e stakeholders. Il volume raccoglie quasi cinquanta testi scritti dopo un fruttuoso dibattito non solo su teorie, approcci e metodi, ma anche sulle implicazioni pratiche della pianificazione urbana per i luoghi dello shopping e del consumo. I casi studio spaziano da San Paolo a Presidente Prudente, da Buenos Aires a Città del Messico ed ancora da Barcellona e Lleida a Lisbona, Parigi, Ankara, Copenhagen e molte città italiane. Attraverso diverse scale di analisi, gli autori hanno posto la loro attenzione su temi rilevanti per gli studi urbani: resilienza, sostenibilità, dialettica tra spazi pubblici e privati, impatto dell’e-commerce nelle aree urbane, gentrificazione residenziale e commerciale, neoliberismo e diritto alla città. /[English]: City, Retail and Consumption focuses on changing urban spaces through the interpretative key offered by retail and consumption, between globalization processes and the embeddedness in local contexts. The book was published in 2015 as the result of the fourth international seminar on the three issues, carried out at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” from 14 to 17 October 2013 thanks to the contribution of geographers from various countries (Brazil, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and enriched by contributions from specialists (architects, urban planners, engineers, economists) and stakeholders. The volume collects almost fifty texts written after a fruitful debate not only about theories, approaches and methods but also about the practical implications of the urban planning for shopping and consumption places. The case studies range from Sao Paulo to Presidente Prudente, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and again from Barcelona and Lleida to Lisbon, Paris, Ankara, Copenhagen and many Italian cities. Through different scales of analysis, the contributors have indeed paid their attention on relevant issues to urban studies: resilience, sustainability, dialectic between public and private spaces, impact of e-commerce in urban areas, residential and retail gentrification, neoliberalism and the right to the city

WASTESCAPE REGENERATION. Values, approaches and tools to operationalise circular city models

This research investigates the wastescapes and their regeneration in urban contexts, presenting a deepening definition and an evaluation framework for a collaborative regeneration process. Because of the concept of waste, the wastescape is deemed as a multidimensional cultural landscape, constituted of discarded parts of metabolic resources, areas, built environment, society, and others systems of waste. Thus, it is composed of various multidimensional waste systems interplaying at different scales. In this sense, a wastescape is not only limited to a spatial domain. The urban physiology and morphology of the Netzstadt framework let define the urban systems of wastescape; mainly, metabolic processes and the built environment are explored in this research, and values, tools and methods to support regenerative processes in the frame of the circular city. Circular economy (CE) is becoming a global challenge to implement regenerative urban strategies in sustainability transition. Urban metabolism of waste, waste architecture and urban communities are the constituent systems considered in this study. Each one has different scales of analysis. While the urban metabolism is analysed at a big scale, the wasted architecture and urban community role are observed locally. The two scales reveal complementary issues and opportunities for the regeneration processes toward circular cities. This, the evaluation of an urban wastescape, as a multidimensional cultural landscape, consider environmental, social, economic and cultural dimensions. In this perspective, the urban landscape services can be the benchmarks for quantitative and qualitative analyses of the evaluation of the performances. In the circular city frame, policies and projects are oriented to the collaboration of multiple stakeholders and local actors. In this way, urban wastescape regeneration considers social equity and environmental justice in its fundamentals. In this path, the thesis explore both materials and methods of wastescape regeneration. In such urban policies, spatial decision-making support systems allow for managing multi-dimensional and multi-actor evaluation processes. The Geodesign method and multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDAs) are tested in two case studies at different scales. The case studies present two different wastescape analyses at two different scales, considering some relevant physiological and morphological aspects. The first case study analyses the Naples urban metabolism of waste in the REPAiR project. Starting from the CE principle that considers waste as a resource for sustainable development, resource management is at the centre of the REPAiR project research. In the Naples case, the Activity-based Spatial Material Flow Analysis (AS-MFA) map the organic waste and construction and demolition waste streams on the territory. From this wastescape status quo, the Geodesign Decision Support Environment supports the co-creation of circular economy strategies. It is a collaborative decision-making process, from knowledge to negotiation phase. Without deepening the morphological aspects, the AS_MFA maps and the geodesign method represent the two innovative tools for urban wastescape regenerations in a collaborative decision-making process. On a smaller scale, two cases of modern marginal neighbourhoods in Naples and Amsterdam show the social and spatial issues of wastescape of wasted architectures and marginal communities. In these cases, the urban morphological conditions produced urban wastescape physiological conditions. Similar circumstances and different events lead to two regeneration processes compared at the end of the section. The most significant transformations happened through architecture, public policies and communities of place and communities of practice. The demolition and adaptive reuse of modern architectures changed some environmental perceptions that led to the rejection of the place. The intense bottom-up actions and community actions made urban social regeneration over the years. Rejection, exclusion, cultural stigma, and prejudice made the neighbourhood urban wastescapes. The three cases study explore values, approaches and tools for wastescape regeneration at two different scales. They are part of the same approach to circularity. The cases show that circular economy in urban areas come up against two main issues: legal and cultural. Environmental and economic issues stem from those. The available techniques and technologies in waste management can be improved, but many are already available and underused. Any waste in urban areas is currently a problem, creating blighted areas and disamenities. Together with actors and stakeholders, the thesis shows how communities of place and practices are the core of long term sustainable transformations. In this path, circularity is the economic approach, and collaborative decision-making processes can ensure transparency and the inclusion of actors, stakeholders and local groups to transition to the circular city

Ecology-based planning. Italian and French experimentations

This paper examines some French and Italian experimentations of green infrastructures’ (GI) construction in relation to their techniques and methodologies. The construction of a multifunctional green infrastructure can lead to the generation of a number of relevant bene fi ts able to face the increasing challenges of climate change and resilience (for example, social, ecological and environmental through the recognition of the concept of ecosystem services) and could ease the achievement of a performance-based approach. This approach, differently from the traditional prescriptive one, helps to attain a better and more fl exible land-use integration. In both countries, GI play an important role in contrasting land take and, for their adaptive and cross-scale nature, they help to generate a res ilient approach to urban plans and projects. Due to their fl exible and site-based nature, GI can be adapted, even if through different methodologies and approaches, both to urban and extra-urban contexts. On one hand, France, through its strong national policy on ecological networks, recognizes them as one of the major planning strategies toward a more sustainable development of territories; on the other hand, Italy has no national policy and Regions still have a hard time integrating them in already existing planning tools. In this perspective, Italian experimentations on GI construction appear to be a simple and sporadic add-on of urban and regional plans

HERITAGE 2022. International Conference on Vernacular Heritage: Culture, People and Sustainability

Vernacular architecture, tangible and intangible heritage of great importance to European and global culture, represents the response of a society culturally linked to its territory, in terms of climate and landscape. Its construction features are born from the practical experience of the inhabitants, making use of local materials, taking into consideration geographical conditions and cultural, social and constructive traditions, based on the conditions of the surrounding nature and habitat. Above all, it plays an essential role in contemporary society as it is able to teach us important principles and lessons for a respectful sustainable architecture. Vernacular Heritage: Culture, People and Sustainability will be a valuable source of information for academics and professionals in the fields of Environmental Science, Civil Engineering, Construction and Building Engineering and ArchitectureMileto, C.; Vegas López-Manzanares, F.; Cristini, V.; García Soriano, L. (2022). HERITAGE 2022. International Conference on Vernacular Heritage: Culture, People and Sustainability. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/HERITAGE2022.2022.15942EDITORIA

From multiple Ecosystem Services (ES) to ES Multifunctionality: assessing territorial transformations in spatial planning

Urban planning discipline initially arose from the need to rationalize and acquire instruments to manage the expansion of urban agglomerations (Salzano, 1998).Through decade this approach, that we consider as a process, suffered the dualism between urbanism and environmentalism generated a distorted perception of the disciplinary principles. On one side, the radicalization of environmentalism perspective that puts nature conservation before any hypothesis of territorial anthropic transformation deemed necessary to pursue socio-economic development objectives. On the other side, the adoption of human-centered socio-economic development models in which several environmental goods and services spontaneously provided by natural ecosystems were not included in “commodities”, i.e. without exchange value. This second paradigm has only recently - and partially - been questioned. A decisive factor has been the recognition and consequent increase in awareness among scientists, politicians and citizens' movements that natural resources are limited. On the basis of these assumptions, this research work is based on the firm conviction that spatial planning is a privileged dimension in which the above factors can converge in a sustainable perspective. This consideration stimulates research questions oriented to balance the conflicting needs of conservation of natural resources, economic development and social equity. The effective handling of the challenges outlined is undermined by the lack of full integration of the environmental components management in the traditional planning system, which, according to the author, can be ascribed to three main weaknesses: - the first weakness concerns the rigidly prescriptive of “zoning” (Cortinovis & Geneletti, 2020). It is based on verifying the suitability of the territory for a specific function and it leads to an a-priori design of the plan aimed at "conforming" development projects and actions to the pre-established strategy (Janin Rivolin, 2008). This aspect, object of criticism by an extensive scientific literature that puts it in opposition to an alternative approach based on the concept of performance (Baker et al., 2006; Faludi, 2000b; Frew et al., 2016; Geneletti et al., 2017; Haller, 2014), has generated criticalities and inefficiencies (Scorza, Saganeiti, et al., 2020). This lack of flexibility depends from the rapidity with which the community needs evolve, making the traditional plan “vintage” and inadequate (Romano et al., 2018). - an additional weakness of the traditional planning system is the overlapping policies and responsibilities at different territorial government levels (Nolte et al., 2010) that are often reflected in cross-scale political contradictions (Apostolopoulou et al., 2012) linked to a range of sectoral policies (Winkel et al., 2015) and a top-down governance gap (L. C. Stringer & Paavola, 2013). As highlighted by the authors (Scorza et al., 2021; Scorza, Pilogallo, Saganeiti, & Murgante, 2020a), this fragmentation affects long-term strategies related to the sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2015), the mitigation and adaptation measures to climate changes (Lovell & Taylor, 2013; Pachauri et al., 2015; Pramova et al., 2012), the conservation of biodiversity (Balletto et al., 2020; IPBES, 2019) and natural resources (Bongaarts, 2019; Primmer & Furman, 2012). - the third weakness concerns the failure of traditional planning in promoting the quality of territorial transformations beyond minimum thresholds depending on technical and sectorial rules. This criticality manifests itself both at urban scale and at territorial scale. For instance, if we refer to the urban context, the assessment of transformations related to urban development including environmental components pursues, in the Italian practice, the traditional approach related to the concept of "urban standard". These are nothing more than minimum thresholds that regulate the availability of services and facilities for each inhabitant, regardless of the assessment of the effective improvement of citizens' well-being (Colavitti et al., 2020; Graça et al., 2018). In the scientific literature, several authors advocate overcoming this approach, highlighting the opportunity to explicitly refer the real needs of citizens generating specific demands for services and urban functions depending on the specific context (Cortinovis & Geneletti, 2020; Gobattoni et al., 2017; Ronchi et al., 2020). At the territorial scale, the fundamental normative framework for the evaluation of territorial transformations is the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). It consists of a coherence check with the binding framework foreseen for the territory in which the project is inserted, and in the consequent agreement/disagreement on the impacts that the project exerts on each component of environmental matrix. The effectiveness of this procedure, already weak in a context where there is no effective process of involvement and participation of decision-makers and stakeholders (R. De Groot, 2006), is further undermined by the absence of adequate monitoring systems of territorial transformations capable of providing a comprehensive and integrated view of the expected effects at several scales (Scorza, Saganeiti, et al., 2020). In spatial planning and land use management, ES constitutes an integrated and robust analytical framework as it is directly related to land use patterns and their changes over time, to the spatial distribution of different spatial components (both natural and anthropic) as well as to the implementation of land use plans and policies (Ronchi, 2018) producing two levels of contributions: informative and methodological. The first refers to the possibility of measuring and spatializing the services that ecosystems provide for citizens' well-being. This implies the possibility to improve the knowledge infrastructure that supports the planning process in its different phases. The spatially explicit assessment of ES can take place ex-ante and provide the elements for deepening the knowledge framework and spatializing the demands emerging from the territory in terms of specific ES (Bolund, Permar & Hunham, 1999). For example, in the urban context it is possible to map areas where there is an unsatisfied demand for recreational services (Giedych et al., 2017; Graça et al., 2018), for local temperature regulation (a service linked to the growing topic of heat islands) (Elliot et al., 2020; Sabrina Lai et al., 2020), or for the absorption of noise and atmospheric pollutants along routes with heavy vehicle traffic (Blum, 2017; De Carvalho & Szlafsztein, 2019). Instead, in the case of ex-post evaluation, ES offer an effective infrastructure for monitoring the actual benefits deriving from the implementation of the planned actions. In addition, we include in this contribution the communicative capacity of this approach towards non-expert stakeholders and decision-makers, which is expressed both by acting as an interface between science and decision-makers (Gustafsson et al., 2020; Perrings et al., 2011), and by contributing to increasing the transparency of the plan process (Karrasch et al., 2014; Schröter et al., 2018). The methodological contribution, instead, refers to support the elaboration and benchmarking of alternative development/transformation scenarios, making quantitatively and spatially explicit the impacts of planned actions on the wider territorial values system (environmental, social, cultural, etc). This reinforces the capacity of rational decision-makers to take “better” decisions (Owens, 2005; Sanderson, 2002; Scorza et al., 2019; Weiss, 1979) by structuring a context-based assessment framework (Gee & Burkhard, 2010; Potschin & Haines-Young, 2013a), tailored to the features of the territorial system’s structure. This dimension becomes even more important when the territorial transformation drivers act in a different scale than the one where impacts become measurable (Scorza, Pilogallo, Saganeiti, Murgante, et al., 2020b). In particular, the focus is on ES multifunctionality intended as the opportunity offered by the ES approach to consider “the joint supply of multiple Ecosystem Services (ES)” (Mastrangelo et al., 2014; Stürck & Verburg, 2017), i.e. the natural capacity of ecosystems to deliver for humans manifold benefits (Hansen & Pauleit, 2014). This concept derives from disciplinary fields related to ecology (Byrnes et al., 2014). It was successively adopted in conservation planning where, for the purposes of biodiversity conservation and enhancement, was applied as a criteria to define priority areas to be protected (Cimon-Morin & Poulin, 2018; García-Llorente et al., 2018; Y.-P. P. Lin et al., 2017; Vaz et al., 2021). In contrast to monofunctional “grey” infrastructures, the European Commission furtherly declined its meaning within the “Green Infrastructure-Enhancing Europe’s Natural Capital” Strategy (European Environment Agency, 2013) where GI are defined and specifically designed to “deliver a wide range of ES”. In this specific application domain, ES multifunctionality has been applied at different spatial scales from the urban to the territorial one (Arcidiacono et al., 2016; Cannas et al., 2018b; D. La Rosa & Privitera, 2013; Sabrina Lai et al., 2018a; Ronchi et al., 2020; Zhang & Muñoz Ramírez, 2019). Whereas initially it constitutes a value in itself (from the perspective of providing as many of whatever ES as possible), aiming at meeting as many demands and valuing co-benefits as much as possible (Hansen & Pauleit, 2014). Recently, the interest in spatial and urban planning disciplines toward the ES multifunctionality approach also increased (Artmann, 2014; Dendoncker et al., 2013; Hansen et al., 2015; Primmer & Furman, 2012). This is due to several factors. Firstly, some authors point it as a useful tool to operationalize the concepts of efficient use of natural resources’ use efficiency (Gómez-Baggethun & Barton, 2013a) and sustainability (R. De Groot, 2006; Dendoncker et al., 2013; Selman, 2009), included among the founding principles of planning (Las Casas & Scorza, 2016a). Secondly, considering several goods and benefits simultaneously, means pursuing several environmental, social, cultural and economic objectives and addressing different potentially conflicting demands in both urban planning and spatial governance. This directly relates to the complexity of socio-ecological systems (Gómez-Baggethun & Barton, 2013b; Murray-Rust et al., 2011) that characterize human settlements: the capacity to supply multiple ES results in perceived benefits, for example in terms of human health, social cohesion and in the diversification of rural economic opportunities (Fagerholm et al., 2020; Lafortezza et al., 2013; Tzoulas et al., 2007). Finally, different authors (Galler et al., 2016a; Uthes et al., 2010) argue that pursuing ES multifunctionality as an objective, makes it possible to increase the efficiency of efforts - including economic ones - to protect the various environmental components. Although there is no unambiguous definition of ES multifunctionality in the literature (Mastrangelo et al., 2014) and there is also a lack of agreement on which ES should be delivered by territorial components in order to be considered “multifunctional” (Stürck & Verburg, 2017), this approach promises to be able to confer several added values to the plan process. In the light of these premises, the research program was structured around one main question: How can the ES multifunctionality approach contribute to renew the planning system placing environmental components as services providers whose availability represents a pre-condition for any sustainable development strategy? Therefore, the general objective is to deepen the ES multifunctionality concept, generalizing a framework methodology supporting the planning process. The research was therefore divided into several steps. An extensive analysis of scientific bibliography was carried out in order to explore conceptualizations, computational methods and applications of ES multifunctionality to selected case studies in order to demonstrate potentials and shortcomings. The thesis structure follows the “three papers” format, which generally consists of a collection of articles recently published in (or submitted for publication to) international peer-review journals. Specifically, this thesis consists of an introductory chapter that places the research agenda within the broader disciplinary framework, five chapters that constitute the main body of the thesis and a final chapter that describes the major findings and outlines the future perspectives of the research. The main contents of each chapter are described below: - Chapter 2 proposes a critical review of the ES multifunctionality in the urban and spatial planners’ perspective; - Chapter 3 has the purpose of illustrating the main computation methods of the ES subsequently implemented in the further case studies; - Chapter 4 describes an original “Cities ranking” applying ES multifunctionality approach based on the Multiple Ecosystem Services Landscape Index (MESLI) formulated by (Rodríguez-Loinaz et al., 2015b). - Chapter 5 is a further application of the ES multifunctionality approach conducted at the national scale. With the purpose is to provide an interpretive framework of the land use dynamics that occurred in the period 2000-2018 based on three different indices of ES multifunctionality. The results show that the settlement dynamics and the territorial transformations occurred, produced a different effect on the three indices highlighting that their joint interpretation can support the definition of ES multifunctionality conservation strategies. The last concluding chapter illustrates the results highlighting that they may contribute to reinforce the planner’s toolkit for a more effective decision-making in managing territorial development (Batty, 2013; Friedmann, 2019; Healey, 2003), defining an up to date methodological framework oriented to enhance the procedural approach in planning (Alexander & Faludi, 2016), grounded on evaluation stage (Weiss, 1972) highlighting lessons learnt and cyclic approach

From Urban Systems to Sustainable Competitive Metropolitan Regions

Una raccolta di essay sullo sviluppo della' citta' che illustra come le citta' si sono sviluppate per affrontare meglio le questioni di competitivita' e di sostenibilita'.Alla base della raccolta le ricerche di EURICUR dell'Erasmus University Rotterdam

Environmental and territorial modelling for planning and design

Between 5th and 8th September 2018 the tenth edition of the INPUT conference took place in Viterbo, guests of the beautiful setting of the University of Tuscia and its DAFNE Department. INPUT is managed by an informal group of Italian academic researchers working in many fields related to the exploitation of informatics in planning. This Tenth Edition pursed multiple objectives with a holistic, boundary-less character, to face the complexity of today socio-ecological systems following a systemic approach aimed to problem solving. In particular, the Conference will aim to present the state of art of modeling approaches employed in urban and territorial planning in national and international contexts. Moreover, the conference has hosted a Geodesign workshop, by Carl Steinitz (Harvard Graduate School of Design) and Hrishi Ballal (on skype), Tess Canfield, Michele Campagna. Finally, on the last day of the conference, took place the QGIS hackfest, in which over 20 free software developers from all over Italy discussed the latest news and updates from the QGIS network. The acronym INPUT was born as INformatics for Urban and Regional Planning. In the transition to graphics, unintentionally, the first term was transformed into “Innovation”, with a fine example of serendipity, in which a small mistake turns into something new and intriguing. The opportunity is taken to propose to the organizers and the scientific committee of the next appointment to formalize this change of the acronym. This 10th edition was focused on Environmental and Territorial Modeling for planning and design. It has been considered a fundamental theme, especially in relation to the issue of environmental sustainability, which requires a rigorous and in-depth analysis of processes, a theme which can be satisfied by the territorial information systems and, above all, by modeling simulation of processes. In this topic, models are useful with the managerial approach, to highlight the many aspects of complex city and landscape systems. In consequence, their use must be deeply critical, not for rigid forecasts, but as an aid to the management decisions of complex systems

Villages et quartiers à risque d’abandon

The issue of villages and neighborhoods at risk of abandonment is a common topic in many Mediterranean regions and is considered as a strategic point of the new European policies. The progressive abandonment of inland areas, with phenomena of emigration and fragmentation of cultural heritage, is a common trend in countries characterized by economic underdevelopment. This leads to the decay of architectural artifacts and buildings and problems with land management. Some aspects of this issue are also found in several urban areas. The goal of this research work is collecting international debates, discussions, opinions and comparisons concerning the analysis, study, surveys, diagnoses and graphical rendering of architectural heritage and landscape as well as demo-ethno-anthropological witnesses, typological-constructive stratifications, materials and technologies of traditional and vernacular constructions of historic buildings