Resilient urban form addressing pandemic crisis

The pandemic experience of COVID-19 motivated this work, which addresses the need to integrate resilience concept with urban morphology in crisis-time. Indeed, the physical form of cities is relevant in developing their capacity to deal with stressing events and changing conditions. Thus, since citizens' lifestyle will be drastically influenced, the novel Coronavirus pandemic and related global challenges addressing cities and their inhabitants appear both an unexpected and interesting occasion to study the practical role of resilience to deal with pandemic conditions also at urban form level, with long-time perspective. This virus has certainly raised the need to re-discuss the paradigm of planning, designing and managing the city under pressure passing through the concepts of resilience, disturbance absorption and system reorganization. Thus, learning from the first lessons of COVID-19 at the urban and neighbourhood level, this paper provides some practical reflections that can be useful, to both academics, policy-makers and professionals, in identifying resilient urban forms capable to confirm urban properties already in place or to highlight new needs and requirements to deal with this disturbance. In this sense, the present crisis is arising a lot of questions around the urban form properties that may have favoured or limited the current and future spread of the infection, with the final purpose to make cities liveable, healthy and safe again. To reach that, the concept of "resilient urban forms" needs to consider both the physical and nonphysical aspects of the urban built-environment. In this regard, the effort to "add some words" to this ground-breaking framework on "Resilient Urban Form in time of Pandemic" might contribute to the development of a new research frontier for merging spatial-principles, urban resilience concepts and public health studies, providing both theoretical inputs for further debate and practical ideas to increase urban longevity

Integrating Resilience Concept and Urban Morphology. A contradictory merging attempt or a promising combination?

Today cities are particularly vulnerable to any kind of pressures. The increase in urban complexity requires a better understanding of physical urbanization, and parallelly a shift in how cities are linked to environmental dynamics. Tackling the urban complexity requires a socio-ecological system-view where cities appear living and dynamic systems, whose processes and structures are interacting over time at morphological, ecological and socio-cultural levels. These interdependencies can be handled by understanding the extent to which urban forms will be able to resist, adapt to or evolve under pressures and fulfil needs and functions either similar or different from their original ones. However, the explicit introduction of the element of change in the urban morphology field might contrast with the traditional image of built environment linked to order and rigidity. To this regard, resilience concept appears an interesting lens through which reading and understanding the changing urban-world. The paper explores the combination of urban morphology and co-evolutionary resilience, considering urban form as a key factor in urban resilience. Dealing with some resilient-morphological aspects, the work discusses possible interdependencies between resilience theory and urban morphology and seeks to understand if “resilient urban form” represents a “property” of cities or rather an “end-point”

Mainstreaming Energetic Resilience by Morphological Assessment in Ordinary Land Use Planning. The Case Study of Moncalieri, Turin (Italy)

Energetic resilience is seen as one of the most prominent fields of investigation in the upcoming years. The increasing efficiency of urban systems depends on the conversion of energetic production of buildings, and therefore, from the capacity of urban systems to be more rational in the use of renewable resources. Nevertheless, the integration of the energetic regulation into the ordinary urban planning documents is far from being reached in most of planning processes. In Italy, mainstreaming energetic resilience in ordinary land use planning appears particularly challenging, even in those Local Administrations that tried to implement the national legislation into Local Building Regulation. In this work, an empirical methodology to provide an overall assessment of the solar production capacity has been applied to selected indicators of urban morphology among the different land use parcel-zones, while implementing a geographic information system-based approach to the city of Moncalieri, Turin (Italy). Results demonstrate that, without exception, the current minimum energy levels required by law are generally much lower than the effective potential solar energy production that each land use parcel-zone could effectively produce. We concluded that local planning processes should update their land use plans to reach environmental sustainability targets, while at the same time the energetic resilience should be mainstreamed in urban planning by an in-depth analysis of the effective morphological constraints. These aspects may also represent a contribution to the international debates on energetic resilience and on the progressive inclusion of energy subjects in the land use planning process

An overview of the Italian forest biodiversity and its conservation level, based on the first outcomes of the 4th Habitat Report ex-Art. 17

In 2019 the 4th Report ex-Art. 17 on the conservation status (CS) of Annex I Habitats of the 92/43/EEC Directive was expected by every EU/28 country, with reference to the period 2013-18. In Italy, the process was in charge to the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), on behalf of the Ministry for Environment, Land and Sea Protection (MATTM), with the scientific support of the Italian Botanical Society (SBI). A large group of thematic and territorial experts elaborated the available data concerning the 124 types of terrestrial and inland water Habitats present in Italy, 39 of which are represented by Forest Habitats (Group 9),. The main aim of the work was the evaluation of the overall CS of each Habitat by Biogeographic Region (Mediterranean, Continental and Alpine), for a total amount of 294 assessments. A high proportion of these (92, corresponding to 31% of the total) referred to Forest Habitats, including 20 marginal types for which the CS was not requested. The analysis was carried out at different scales: a) administrative territory, through the data contained in the ISPRA database, whose compilation was in charge to the Regions and Autonomous Provinces; b) Natura 2000 site, with the latest updates available (Standard Data Forms updated to 2018); c) national scale, implementing the distribution maps for each Habitat based on the European grid ETRS89-LAEA5210 (10x10 km2 mesh); d) Biogeographic Region, scale of the final assessment. Cartographic outcomes, associated databases and additional data used for the assessments will be available online on the ISPRA Portal as soon as the validation process by the European Commission will be completed. A dedicated archive named "HAB_IT" has been created in the national database "VegItaly" (1), managed by the Italian Society of Vegetation Science, where the phytosociological relevés representative of the various Annex I Habitats in Italy will be archived and freely accessible. An overview of the results regarding the Forest habitats is here provided, including a comparison with the outcomes of the former reporting cycle, the 3rd Report ex-Art. 17 (2). In several cases (e.g. 9120, 91L0), the distribution maps have been remarkably improved due to better knowledge and more fitful interpretation. The conservation status resulted as Favourable (FV) for 6,7%, Inadequate (U1) for 58,7% and Bad (U1) for 32,0% of the 72 assessed forest Habitat types. In no case there was an improvement of the conservation status, while in 6 cases a worsening of the conditions resulted from the data analysis, pointing out the Habitats types with a higher need of action. Similarly to other projects carried out as a team by the network of Annex I Habitat experts of the Italian Botanical Society and the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (e.g. 3, 4), this is another step in the direction of supporting the implementation of the 92/43/EEC "Habitat" Directive in Italy and Europe. On this ground, the high biodiversity of the Italian forest Habitats could be emphasized, however results pointed out that some rare or endemic types (e.g. Alnus cordata or Betula aetnensis-dominated forests) are still scarcely acknowledged by the most prominent EU conservation tools such as the Annex I to the "Habitat" Directive. 1) F. Landucci et al. (2012) Plant Biosyst., 146(4), 756-763 2) P. Genovesi et al. (2014) ISPRA, Serie Rapporti, 194/2014 3) E. Biondi et al. (2009) Società Botanica Italiana, MATTM, D.P.N., http://vnr.unipg.it/habitat/ 4) D. Gigante et al. (2016) Plant Sociology, 53(2), 77-8

Solar Observations with Single-Dish INAF Radio Telescopes: Continuum Imaging in the 18 - 26 GHz Range

We present a new solar radio imaging system implemented through the upgrade of the large single-dish telescopes of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), not originally conceived for solar observations