Density and sustainability as a new paradigm for urban resilience. European programs for territorial adaptation projects

Risk management due to the unstoppable effects of climate change on the territory is an increasingly topical subject in the international scientific debate. The theme of changing cities involves different disciplinary sectors, so it would not be exhaustive to analyse it from a unilateral point of view. The contribution proposes a multidisciplinary and multi-scale analysis related to the adaptation measures of urban agglomerations through a socio-economic analysis aimed at achieving a high level of security, efficiency of ecosystems and social inclusion. Overcoming the sectorial and specialist approach of modernist urbanism is the basis for addressing what appears to be the "challenge" of the new millennium. It is authors' conviction that the physical transformations of space, in the presence of geomorphological alterations due to climate change, must be based on strategic policies in the medium and long term, shared and articulated at the different levels of government of the territory. In this frame of reference, the question of density merges with the concept of sustainability, overcoming it, becoming a new paradigm of urban resilience

Landscape policies, urban and territorial planning to support SNSVS and SNAC

The article is part of the broader debate concerning the processes of transposition, on a local scale, of the national strategies of socio-economic and environmental interest. Specifically, the focus will be on the integration of the objectives of two specific Strategies: National Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change (hereinafter SNAC) and National Strategy for Sustainable Development (hereinafter SNSVS), in territorial government policies, and among territorial planning tools. From a doctrinal point of view, these Strategies can be registered in the category of Soft Laws; this particular juridical “nature” involves some administrative weaknesses for which the SNAC and the SNSVS need tools and institutes dedicated to their transposition on a local scale. Landscape, urban and territorial planning represent the suitable tools through which to implement the aims of these Strategies while favouring, at the same time, greater participation of local institutions in decision-making processes, in compliance with the principles of multilevel governance desired by the European Landscape Convention

Sustainable Urban Project. The role of public spaces in adapting cities to the effects of climate change

Contemporary urban planning is nowadays getting involved into thematic related with the slow and unceasing city transformations. This circumstance highlights the need for overcoming the sectoral approach to urban complexity, in favor of a more integrated one. The context to which reference is made is the urban area; the challenge is about the adaptation to the physical, social and economic transformations; the intervention tool to which the contribution refers is that of Urban Project. The authors focus is referred to the urban transformations induced by the effects of climate change, with specific reference to the increasingly frequent floods: highlighting their effects ,in terms of design, on public spaces, and analyzing some good practices that have managed to transform the calamitous event into an urban development engine. The paper proposes a critical reflection on two case studies, “Water Square” in Benthemplein and “Climate tiles” in Copenhagen that represent ways of intervening on public space, at different scale, the first one in the field of urban planning, the latter in the field of Urban Design, complementary approaches for an ecological reconversion of city areas compromised by the effects of climate change

Sea Level Rise and Coastal Impacts. Innovation and Improvement of the Local Urban Plan for a Climate-Proof Adaptation Strategy

In recent years, the territorial impacts connected to sea level rise have prompted a reflection on the responsibilities of policy makers in transposing these issues into urban agendas. The need also emerged to both broaden and update the skills of urban planners and to improve territorial governance tools, with the aim of developing feasible regeneration and resilience strategies to face climate change. In this paper, a methodology for the production of Flood Risk Maps is presented, as applied to the Municipality of Ravenna, Italy, by only considering the static component of inundation hazard, i.e., the projected Mean Sea Level Rise, as a first step towards increased preparedness. The resulting Flood Risk Maps represent, in fact, an innovation with respect to the current cognitive framework that supports local urban planning, by providing information on a potential risk that has so far been overlooked. The method combines sea level rise projections under the pessimistic RCP8.5 scenario with georeferenced territorial data, aiming to identify the physical consistency of the urban-structure components which are potentially at risk. For successive time horizons (2030, 2050 and 2100), our results show the progressive impairment and potential degradation of extensive urban areas that are disregarded in the urban planning regulations currently in force. This preliminary evaluation phase is aimed at prompting and supporting the necessary updating of the planning tools and regulations adopted by the public bodies responsible for territorial governance, by identifying priority areas for intervention, and helping define mitigation and adaptation actions

Urban natures for urban resilience. Time-phases design for Changing Cities

Within the urban nature’s framework, the territory’s geomorphic changes due to climate change and how the build environment interacts with these spaces are of paramount importance. Specifically, the objective is to highlight how, in certain circumstances, the strong link between architecture and nature can result in a clear domination of one part on the other. This needs to be taken into account when considering the planning strategies to adopt in a specified area in order to re-establish the right systemic balance. In particular, coastal areas at risk of flooding, due to the constant rise in sea levels expected in the next fifty to one hundred years, have been analysed. These are areas that require long-term management, that goes beyond the normal characterisation of urban spaces; specifically, such areas could be defined as changing urban spaces. It is clear that the designs for these areas could not possibly do without a design parameter which is often underestimated: time. Nowadays, this is often introduced in the maintenance phase of the project, only rarely is it considered with the space component during the preliminary project. This leads to a clear predominance of the spatial parameter over the temporal one. Nevertheless, the designer is required to face up to the fact that space changes over time. Therefore, the urban environment needs to be reinterpreted, going from a static system to a dynamic one which changes with time, analogous to a living organism. Thus, a valid methodological response to the cities’ geomorphic changes is a time-phased design. Natural phenomena like floods cannot be avoided, they represent objective facts to be faced. For this reason, it is necessary to adopt resilient urban strategies, capable of transforming a traumatic event into a resource in both landscaping and economic terms. First of all, this operation requires an analytical approach which takes into account the city’s different systemic components: nature, infrastructure the settlement, and, consequently, the relationships between them. Once the guidelines have been identified, the priority will be towards the geomorphic adaptation of the land, in order to develop the area in a completely safe way, identifying three design time-phases, the current situation, after fifty years and after a century. At this point, it will be possible to adopt targeted planning strategies which will prevent the advance of the water in certain areas, follow the natural course of the floods in others, and integrate the water in the design in others. These measures do not refer to a specific planning phase, but to all of them simultaneously, making it possible to absorb the landscape’s natural changes and allowing the city to change in harmony with them

Cambiamento climatici e fragilità territoriali. Le sfide per un nuovo welfare urbano

The big impact of human activity on the environment, which has taken place in recent decades, has contributed to determining the crisis dimension that characterizes contemporary territories, which are increasingly defined as "fragile". Human beings have so deeply and irreversibly modified the territory that many scientists are used to define our geological era with the name of "Anthropocene", to arrive to the most recent theories of the so-called "Neo-Anthropocene", according to which man, once understood his responsibility regarding these changes, puts in place a resilient urban development, exploiting his creativity in order to reverse his role: from the main cause to the architect of a new rebirth. The contribution is a part of the reflections specifically referring to the forecasts for sea-level rise as one of the effects of the ongoing climate changes and the direct consequences of the phenomenon on coastal cities, also in terms of urban welfare, manifesting the urgent need to adapt the urban form to the environmental context of reference through reconfiguration actions of the morphological components which consider flexibility and diversity as priority elements, to pursue a sustainable social and economic development. Therefore, the urban regeneration strategy to be adopted in such contexts must be aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change, to restore a renewed perception of safety to the territories affected by these emergency events. Is about adopting a methodological approach that is able to direct a resilient urban development, calling into question the limits of the current urban forms and favouring an overcoming of the sectorial approach to urban complexity in favour of an integrated one

Strategie di rigenerazione urbana per territori climate-proof. Sperimentazione e innovazione nel Piano Urbanistico locale

La cornice tematica entro cui la tesi si colloca è quella degli impatti del fenomeno dell’innalzamento del mare in ambiente urbano e il contesto di sperimentazione è quello nazionale. Tramite un approccio induttivo, volto a delineare lo stato dell’arte delle azioni intraprese a livello locale, vengono messi in evidenza, a termine della prima parte, due approcci paralleli: una dimensione strategica delle agende locali, volta alla definizione di vision per lo sviluppo urbano a medio e lungo termine, e una sperimentale, dal punto di vista dell’aggiornamento del Piano locale. Per quanto riguarda la dimensione strategica delle agende locali, vengono delineate e catalogate, nella seconda parte della tesi, strategie di difesa, adattamento e delocalizzazione; per quanto attiene, invece, alla dimensione sperimentale del Piano locale, viene evidenziato un doppio approccio: integrazione del quadro conoscitivo e definizione di azioni auspicabili. Obiettivo della terza parte è quello di proporre alcuni riferimenti teorico-metodologici e operativi per l’innovazione del Piano urbanistico locale, attraverso la definizione di una metodologia replicabile per l’elaborazione di mappe del rischio da sea level rise a scala urbana, i cui risultati hanno, in primo luogo, l’obiettivo di integrare il panel degli elaborati tematici dello strumento Urbanistico locale e, in secondo luogo, come sviluppo futuro della ricerca, quello di definire “aree prioritarie di intervento”, ponendo le basi per la definizione di categorie di intervento progettuali site-specific sulla base dell’abaco elaborato e presentato nella seconda parte della tesi. Per la sperimentazione è stato scelto il Comune di Ravenna, per il quale sono state elaborate mappe del rischio al fenomeno SLR, a scala locale, che tengono conto delle previsioni al 2030, 2050 e 2100 sull’innalzamento del livello del mare. Dalle mappe del rischio ottenute è stato possibile determinare la consistenza delle aree urbanizzate esposte a rischio inondazione per i tre orizzonti temporali sopracitati, risultato che, da un lato garantisce un aggiornamento del quadro conoscitivo dello strumento urbanistico locale, dall’altro permette, come sviluppo futuro della ricerca, la definizione di categorie di intervento recepibili anche all’interno delle Norme Tecniche di Attuazione, nella forma di un abaco di possibili azioni progettuali, declinate all’interno di più ampie strategie di rigenerazione urbana per territori climate-proof. The thematic framework within which the thesis is placed is that of the impacts of sea level rise phenomenon on the urban settlement and the experimentation context is the national one. The state of the art about actions taken at the local level, is outlined through an inductive approach which highlight two parallel approaches shown at the end of the first part: a strategic dimension of local agendas, aimed at defining vision for urban development (medium and long term), and an experimental one, about updating the local plan. As regards the strategic dimension of local agendas, "defense", "adaptation" and "delocalization" strategies are outlined and cataloged in the second part of the thesis; as regards the experimental dimension of the local plan, a double approach is highlighted: integration of the cognitive framework and definition of desirable actions. The goal of the third part is to propose some theoretical-methodological and operational references for the innovation of the local urban plan, through the definition of a replicable methodology for the elaboration of risk maps to sea level rise (at urban scale). The aim is, first of all, integrating the panel of thematic drawings of the local Urban Planning tool and, secondly, as a future development of the research, defining "priority areas of intervention", laying the foundations for the definition of site-specific design intervention categories on the basis of the abacus elaborated and presented in the second part of the thesis. The Municipality of Ravenna was chosen for the experimentation, for which maps of the risk to the SLR phenomenon were drawn up, on a local scale, which take into account the forecasts for 2030, 2050 and 2100 on sea level rise. From the risk maps obtained it was possible to determine the consistency of the urbanized areas exposed to flood risk for the three time horizons above-mentioned. This result guarantees, on the one hand, an update of the cognitive framework of the local urban-planning tool, on the other it allows , as a future development of the research, the definition of categories of interventions that can also be understood within the "Norme Tecniche di Attuazione" (NTA), in the form of an abacus of possible design actions, declined within broader urban regeneration strategies for climate-proof territories