Decision support tools for urban contingency policy: a scenario approach to risk management of the Vesuvio area in Naples, Italy

Contingency management, in particular the management of unanticipated events outside the control of an ordinary planning system, has in the last 50years become an important andfrequently debated issue in the scientific literature on complex systems management underrisk conditions. The urban system can be regarded as such an open complex system whereexternal events, not always foreseeable with a closed system's model, may strongly impact on the internal dynamics of an urban area.Conventionally, planning the future presupposes collecting information and analyzing itrationally in order to control for unexpected contingency events. But it is an importantquestion in the field of urban planning, how proper strategies can be developed to deal withexternal uncertainty and shocks that transcend the imagination of policy-makers. How should decision-makers respond to such unforeseen jumps in asystem?The aim of this paper is to present and apply a new scientific decision support method based on the future studies literature, with the aim to helpdecision-makers in the strategicmanagement of uncertainty and risk in order "to anticipate the extraordinary events correctlyin order to act more effectively" (Godet, 1987). In particular, we will deploy here the scenariomethodology in combination with multicriteria analysis and fuzzy set theory, as a usefu

Exploring the interplay between urban governance and smart services codesign

The large spreading of e-democracy and e-participatory tools and environments showed, and is still showing, that technologies offer new direction for dealing with the challenge of scaling the deliberative democracy perspective up to the urban governance scale. The recent growth of Urban Living Labs and Human Smart City initiatives is disclosing a promising bridge between the micro-scale of decision and the mechanisms of urban governance. In coherence with these perspectives, the article reports on the interplay between urban governance and the co-design of smart services in urban transformation as it has been observed and analysed in the two European research projects Periphèria and MyNeinghbourhood. The article also discusses the value of service codesign as a strategic practice to experiment new participatory governance in smart cities

Planning in knowledge intensive contexts: systems supporting memory tracing

In the spatial planning domain decision-making processes are carried out in knowledge intensive environments and aim at developing spatial plans as sort of future scenarios containing strategic prescriptions. These scenarios evolve along the decision making process and together with the emerging and evolving cognitive context. Consequently, tracking the assumptions, values, experiences, conversations, and decisions as they evolve along time, is relevant for decision making and enables better informed reflection for the plan development. In order to take into account the temporal dimension of knowledge in plan generation, and not only in the plan itself, we designed MESS, a MEmory Support System able to sustain a dynamic representation of the memory of the organizational field of intervention. In this paper we discuss the theoretical environment we referred while designing MESS and describe the system architecture

Detection of Ligand-induced Conformational Changes in the Activation Loop of Aurora-A Kinase by PELDOR Spectroscopy.

The structure of protein kinases has been extensively studied by protein crystallography. Conformational movement of the kinase activation loop is thought to be crucial for regulation of activity; however, in many cases the position of the activation loop in solution is unknown. Protein kinases are an important class of therapeutic target and kinase inhibitors are classified by their effect on the activation loop. Here, we report the use of pulsed electron double resonance (PELDOR) and site-directed spin labeling to monitor conformational changes through the insertion of MTSL [S-(1-oxyl-2,2,5,5-tetramethyl-2,5-dihydro-1 H-pyrrol-3-yl)methyl methanesulfonothioate] on the dynamic activation loop and a stable site on the outer surface of the enzyme. The action of different ligands such as microtubule-associated protein (TPX2) and inhibitors could be discriminated as well as their ability to lock the activation loop in a fixed conformation. This study provides evidence for structural adaptations that could be used for drug design and a methodological approach that has potential to characterize inhibitors in development