High speed/high capacity railway and regional development - evaluation of effects on spatial accessibility

In the last decade the theme of high speed infrastructure in Italy has been deeply debated, with different political and technical opinions, which have expanded the time for projects and constructions. As a consequence of this long debate, a redefinition of the whole system, moving from high speed to high speed/high capacity railway system (HS/HC) has been agreed. This new model can be considered more suitable especially for the northern Italy corridor, which is highly populated and densely urbanised. Moreover, while the environmental effects of transportation facilities and of high speed infrastructure are relatively well known in literature since the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure has been applied to several study cases, the effects on economical and geographical structure are less studied and so quite often misunderstood or underestimated. According to a demand-side approach, infrastructure investments will follow mobility needs by the economical system, while from a supply-side approach infrastructure are a crucial means of regional growth. This paper presents a study case in northern Italy (the Milan-Verona track, of about 140 km of lenght), and it shows how spatial effect of a transport network can spread off far from the line, determining a new regional hierarchy and new location opportunity in a wide and highly populated area. A comparison has been made between the original high speed model and the most recent high speed-high capacity model. In the two cases the work investigates what is the area where the new infrastructure shows effects, at short and long term. With a spatial interaction model, used to represent residential location in relation to the distribution of workplaces, HS/HC line efficiency by accessibility calculus has been measured, showing several important results. Those results may be of interest even in similar European context where the HS programme is developing.

For a territorial organization with variable geometry

Motivated primarily by the need to control public spending, law 56/14 Measures for metropolitan cities, provinces, unifications and mergers of communes, led to a new institutional architecture of the State, but also to non-negligible impacts on governing territories of a large area. It is obvious that regions, provinces and municipalities intersect in their spatial and demographic dimensions. However, when one wants to review a layout for general reasons, and — perhaps — for the sake of simplification, one cannot exempt it from an assessment of the geographical and demographic realities of the real Italian territories. Investigating territorial planning functions for the coordination of the Provinces is of crucial importance. The reform, for now incomplete, does not seem to have solved the historical weakness on the planning level for boundaries that are not yet well defined. The ability of new institutional architectures to grasp the dynamics of large areas remains to be proven

For a territorial organization with variable geometry

Motivated primarily by the need to control public spending, law 56/14 Measures for metropolitan cities, provinces, unifications and mergers of communes, led to a new institutional architecture of the State, but also to non-negligible impacts on governing territories of a large area.It is obvious that regions, provinces and municipalities intersect in their spatial and demographic dimensions. However, when one wants to review a layout for general reasons, and — perhaps — for the sake of simplification, one cannot exempt it from an assessment of the geographical and demographic realities of the real Italian territories. Investigating territorial planning functions for the coordination of the Provinces is of crucial importance. The reform, for now incomplete, does not seem to have solved the historical weakness on the planning level for boundaries that are not yet well defined. The ability of new institutional architectures to grasp the dynamics of large areas remains to be proven

INTENSSS PA: a systematic approach for INspiring Training ENergy-Spatial Socioeconomic Sustainability to Public Authorities

The INTENSSS PA project, funded by Horizon 2020, the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation of the European Union, aims to support the local authorities involved and their stakeholders to develop an innovative integrated sustainable energy planning concept through a participatory, interdisciplinary and multilevel process. By building individual and institutional capacity of the actors involved, using the Regional Living Lab approach, the concept will be applied in order to develop seven sustainable integrated energy plans. In this first article the project activities and the results achieved so far are preliminary described, anticipating a more extensive and detailed publication on the project planned for the December edition of UPLand – Journal of Urban Planning Landscape & Environmental Design

Climbing for climate

Dalla ricerca all’azione per riaffermare l’impegno per lo sviluppo sostenibile