ECLAS CONFERENCE GHENT 2018 Landscapes of Conflict

Producción CientíficaThroughout the twentieth century, Friuli Venezia Giulia, the north-eastern region of Italy that borders Austria and Slovenia, played a strategic wartime role. From the Great War to the Cold War, the installation of defensive works including barracks, fortifications and infrastructure distinguished the territory. A significant rationalization in the territory and modification in the organizational structure of the Armed Forces took place from the end of the Cold War, through the EU expansion to the countries located on the north-eastern border of Italy, and up to the Army’s transformation from conscription to voluntary service. The town of Casarsa della Delizia represents a case of important significance due to the presence of the “Trieste” barracks, a settlement of extensive and significant environmental impact, a part of which has not been used for years, becoming over time a landscape-abandonment issue, on which action is needed. The paper focuses on the proposals to recover this former military area as a new integrated part of the city, merging the necessity of saving the past heritage and developing a new landscape vision, bringing together the historical and contemporary ways of living and promoting urban regeneration complex operations.European Joint Doctorate “urbanHIST”. European Union. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 721933

Abandoned army barracks in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy) as a potential for new time-shaped community landscapes

Producción CientíficaThe dismantling of the Italian Army Barracks in the Norther-East of Italy in the last 20 years has left a series of wide abandoned areas. In these places, nature has freely operated as a designer, creating new transitional landscapes in the places devoted to protect the Italian borders during the Cold War. We could talk about ‘auto-regenerative’ landscapes. This paper aims to illustrate briefly the process-making of this kind of unconventional landscape over the second half of the XX century in the Region Friuli Venezia Giulia through different scales of intervention that have activated multiple spatial relations over the time. This exceptional infrastructure-based landscape, sized-up by the Italian Army necessities, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has been reconfigured and gradually abandoned, becoming almost completely unused from the year 2000. Authors propose a reading of these derelict spaces and formulate possible new scenarios of sustainable regeneration and inclusive reintegration that aspire to promote a kind of open project to return them, as a social pay-back after more than 100 years of militarization, to the Friuli Venezia Giulia communities

Green Belt of Brescia, Lombardy. From Resilience Strategy to Sustainable Planning in Practice.

The paper focuses on the methods on which it is built the planning strategy for the ‘Parco delle Cave’ (Park of Pits) in Brescia (Lombardy, Italy). This research, begun in 2010 thanks to the insights offered by a master\u27s degree thesis, in February 2016 led to the approval of the variation to Plan of Government of the Territory of the City of Brescia. The authors, at the time, respectively, supervisor and author of the thesis ‘Park of Pits, from protest to proposal\u27 have gradually followed the different stages of approach to the proposed variant through a real multidisciplinary action. The argument that the study and promotion of the realities present in the Brescia area would give a sum of positive values such that they would automatically lead to a virtuous model for the creation of a territorial landscape system has proved partly correct and partly not. At the moment, this large area represents a great solution of continuity in the ecological green belt that surrounds Brescia, not allowing the basis for the correct development of a natural habitat hosting biodiversity and blocking the completion of town outskirts greenway. This research indicates in the ‘Parco delle Cave’ (Pits’ Park) as the necessary ring to complete the Brescia green belt that includes the ‘Parco delle Colline di Brescia’ (Brescia Hills Park), the linear park of the River Mella, and a strong vegetal system along the South Brescia highway (proposed also)

The “Vite Maritata” as a Landscape Catalyst. The Grapevine as Part of Edible Greenways

The grapevine on living trellises, or “vite maritata” in Italian, is an ancient grape growing technique that uses, instead of poles, trees as support for the grapevine to climb. Conceived by the Etruscans, it was a common element in the Italian rural landscape until the 1960s. As an agronomic practice, it has been abandoned mainly because of the ceasing of the socioeconomic forces that drove its expansion, summarized by sharecropping. Today, in evaluating the natural ecosystem and environment, we have the theory of ecosystem services as a powerful tool. This theory states that ecosystems impact human well-being. This impact affects four different categories that group the various services provided by ecosystems. These four categories are provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting. The grapevine on living trellises provides services in all four categories, with precise services regulating microclimate and supporting wildlife (Bigliardi, 2021). The linear arrangement of the grapevine on living trellises in the urban landscape could function as a helpful green infrastructure for wild species of animals and plants, but of course, also for human beings, contrasting territorial fragmentation and promoting biodiversity. As a greenway, it can be a source of recreational spaces and slow mobility and provide substantial food resources, becoming the protagonist of an edible landscape (Fabris, 2010). The Metropolitan City of Milan possesses already a substratum of dismissed railway yards that, united with the renovation of the Navigli canal system, define a favourable environment for the design of this kind of greenways that can contribute to the “ForestaMI” Reforestation Plan of the Lombard metropolis (Boeri, 2021). Moreover, the “vite maritata” fits well with this situation, being acclimated to the climate of the Po valley

An information-oriented paradigm in evaluating accuracy and agreement in radiology

The goal of any radiological diagnostic process is to gain information about the patient's status. However, the mathematical notion of information is usually not adopted to measure the performance of a diagnostic test or the agreement among readers in providing a certain diagnosis. Indeed, commonly used metrics for assessing diagnostic accuracy (e.g., sensitivity and specificity) or inter-reader agreement (Cohen [Formula: see text] statistics) use confusion matrices containing the number of true- and false positives/negatives results of a test, or the number of concordant/discordant categorizations, respectively, thus lacking proper information content. We present a methodological paradigm, based on Shannon's information theory, aiming to measure both accuracy and agreement in diagnostic radiology. This approach models the information flow as a "diagnostic channel" connecting the state of the patient's disease and the radiologist or, in the case of agreement analysis, as an "agreement channel" linking two or more radiologists evaluating the same set of images. For both cases, we proposed some measures, derived from Shannon's mutual information, which can represent an alternative way to express diagnostic accuracy and agreement in radiology.Key points• Diagnostic processes can be modeled with information theory (IT).• IT metrics of diagnostic accuracy are independent from disease prevalence.• IT metrics of inter-reader agreements can overcome Cohen κ pitfalls

Splitting the BLOSUM Score into Numbers of Biological Significance

Mathematical tools developed in the context of Shannon information theory were used to analyze the meaning of the BLOSUM score, which was split into three components termed as the BLOSUM spectrum (or BLOSpectrum). These relate respectively to the sequence convergence (the stochastic similarity of the two protein sequences), to the background frequency divergence (typicality of the amino acid probability distribution in each sequence), and to the target frequency divergence (compliance of the amino acid variations between the two sequences to the protein model implicit in the BLOCKS database). This treatment sharpens the protein sequence comparison, providing a rationale for the biological significance of the obtained score, and helps to identify weakly related sequences. Moreover, the BLOSpectrum can guide the choice of the most appropriate scoring matrix, tailoring it to the evolutionary divergence associated with the two sequences, or indicate if a compositionally adjusted matrix could perform better

Reintegrating cold war landscapes? The former Trieste Barracks in Casarsa della Delizia

Producción CientíficaThis paper engages with a specific feature of former military landscapes, the Cold War barracks, located in a specific territory, the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region in north-eastern Italy, at the former border between the Western and Eastern blocs. Based on several academic activities, such as an international workshop and didactical experiences, this work focuses on the Trieste Barracks in Casarsa della Delizia (in the province of Pordenone) as a laboratory for new landscape solutions to reintegrate a derelict military site into civil society. The main outputs of the research are: 1) updating the international scientific literature and the relative research gaps in the discourse of Cold War post-military landscapes; and 2) an innovative landscape-oriented approach to a former military landscape founded on locally based long-term solutions in terms of resilience and sustainable development. Our research aims to demonstrate that Cold War landscapes have primarily been neglected in the academic field, but academic work in collaboration with local actors can result in feasible solutions to export to other cases

GREENWAYS IN AN EMERGING CITY CONTEXT: A UTOPIA OR A CHANCE FOR INNOVATION?

Greenways today represent an already diffused practice in great part of the contemporary cities’ planning policies. This constantly growing phenomenon is undoubtedly due to the multiplicity of beneficial effects that they successfully exercise within different urban environments. The present paper aims to explore their potentialities inside a relatively new type of cities’ contexts, namely the emerging ones. Factors like rapid urbanisation and mobility fluxes intensification put under hazardous pressure one of their most vulnerable systems – the green one. That is why its timely reinforcement and integration could play a crucial role in contrasting the negative trends of cities’ ecological asset progressive fragmentation and deterioration. Furthermore, greenways will be examined in a broader perspective, that goes beyond their territorial dimension, conceiving them as important catalysts for cultural and ethical urban evolution