Integrated Urban Regeneration: The Opportunity of Enhancing the Open Spaces (original) (raw)
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Sustainability
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Social and ecological issues in the urban open spaces regeneration
There are many abandoned green areas in urban contexts and this aspect deprives the city of a resource that, if treated, would lead to benefits so as to improve the aesthetics, the attractiveness and, above all, the livability of each district. Having a neighborhood that has green spaces created depending on the needs and desires of the citizens, is to have a collection of many territorial portions that are able to meet the demands of the citizens to achieve an improvement in the quality of life, as well as in the perception that each inhabitant has of the urban and social context in which he lives. This work deals with the requalification of three areas with poor ecosystem-environmental quality located in Maddaloni, Campania. The requalification intervention allows not only to serve three nearby structures with specific functions, but above all to create open spaces where activities could be carried out, which have caught more and more the interest of the citizens. These activities are related mainly to the care of the environment and the city's green areas, but also to the necessity to involve the citizens in the decision process for transparency and active sharing. A space that the citizens have helped to create is a space that they will consequently have a strong desire to live and care for.
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Environmental Science and Sustainable Development, 2021
In the contemporaneity, the issues of land or soil consumption and of the protection of areas that, within the urban areas, provide ecosystem services (ESs) is becoming increasingly important also in relation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The concept of "Ecosystem Service" appears, in this respect, a fruitful support to define the land consumption effects on the loss of functionality and of settlement quality. Following this considerations the paper presents the first results of a research developed in Tuscany and commissioned by the Regional Government. The research aims to measure the loss of ESs in connection with land use / land cover transformations, and to verify the contribution of soil consumption to these variations. The research use methodologies for elaborating of the geographical data required for territorial governance, LUCL 2010/2016 and Land Cover Flow (LCF) model and the theoretical model of the "Capacity matrix" to provide ecosystem services.
If growth in a common language means something unquestionably linked to the process of actual development owing to its ambivalence, in a specialized language it is a word which deserves a careful reflection. In biology growth refers to the primary meaning of life and to its safeguard.; from an economic, social, political, territorial point of view it becomes a metaphor of development and identifies those processes which produce activity, employment, wealth and comfort, namely the conditions which nourish the survival and the continuity of society and communities. The problem of the consideration of the effects is another side which implies a careful reflection on the concept of limit. The limits of growth are represented by the effects of the economic growth: a mainly quantitative and material growth which has altered the finished size of the environment and of the ecosystem, forcing irremediably the physical earth limits (Jackson, 2009). The unlimited growth of the economists is in contrast with the banal law of physics according to which "no finished subsystem can endlessly grow" so that an incessantly growing economic system cannot be contained within a finished ecological system. The economic growth -when it goes beyond these limits that is it becomes unlimited -is in contrast with the features of the environmental context in which it is: it causes a crisis in the biodiversity of the planet and the complex dynamic balance of the climatic system, it threatens the natural systems, the ground, the water cycles, the nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus biogenetic cycles. The responsibilities toward the environment and the risks of the overcoming of its limits are tenets which have been put in evidence since 1972 by The limits of the development, the extraordinary work by some searchers of the MIT who gathered in a club in Rome around Aurelio Peccei: 40 years went by and the theories of ecological economics have by now reinforced in our society the awareness about the limits of the interconnections between the natural systems and the social, technological and economics ones and about their perspectives of future evolution (Randers, 2012). However, this awareness has not fully resulted in lasting principles of politics and transformation practices of the environment yet.
Sustainability Routes: Tools and Methods for Sustainable Refurbishment of Apulian Landscape.
In a recent poll in New Jersey, the New York Times simply asked the people the meaning of “sustainability”: in other words the journal was querying if sustainability was such a prediction where to go or if, for instance, it should have dealt with the compatibility of the town with the active sismic fault. If the answer to the question reveals the importance the inhabitants give to the basic problems of living in town, putting in evidence the importance of perception and urban quality, to the other side show the distance the people. Read in those terms the question of sustainability makes interesting: people need to know where we are going to, the short term compatibility of our devices, which are the instruments to make this real. We are in front to the need to explain to other people, common people, the concept and the tools of sustainability. This paper deals with the managing of urban sustainability and with the methods to work with in the lands between the towns, a part of land which decay create problems to all its parts (roads, villas, functions) coming to a dangerous crisis. The matter of sustainability is almost the field in which research need the strongest acceleration; The case of urban sprawl in the United States Countries demonstrates it: the Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is due to pay 1000 USD to the County of Portland for each new person it hires. “Why has a hyper-competitive company agreed to pay for the privilege of creating jobs? Because it is based in Portland, headquarters of the reaction against “anything-goes” development. And because all over America, for the past year, people have begun to worry about the expansion of jobs, factories, houses, offices, and shops that goes by the name of urban sprawl”. The United States government begun to face this crisis by an economic1 and restrictive2 point of view, worried of a progressive loss of characterisation of its landscape. In Italy the problem is different: the National Plan of 19963 calculates that in the largest Italian towns (39) is concentrated the 53% of Italian inhabitants and the 90% of hi-tech factories4. Those numbers are at the opposite of the USA rates and demonstrate as in our country the matter deals with the abandon of the outer lands instead of the phenomenon of urban sprawl. To prepare the Italian towns to this massive increase of functions, the government has launched in September of 1998 the PRUSST5 programme, started in. In 1999 the Vice-President “announced some tax breaks to help the suburbs buy parks and build public transport systems” from “Urban sprawl: not quite the monster they call it” the “Economist”, August 21st 1999 “last November, voters approved 173 local referendums to limit suburban sprawl by, for example, allowing the purchase of farms near cities or by imposing boundaries restricting urban growth to particular spaces” The National Plan has been approved during the 1996 “Habitat II” the World Conference of the UN Countries “Contratti di quartiere” Alessandra Cattanei, Modulo March 1999. Urban Programs for the Sustainable Requalification (Programmi di Recupero Urbano per lo Sviluppo Sostenibile del Territorio) 1999 after the “agenda 2000” programme6. The PRUSST programme recalls the instrument of “advocacy planning” checking the needs of Italian towns by asking directly the city councils their need. The plan, the first in absolute, gives financial help to all the programs that give priority to the urban sustainability. The first year of experimentation (the deadline for the programmes was the June of 1999) has seen a lot of confusion between either the Councils or the planner because a heavy lack of information but the approach seems right. But there is a risk I can see in this tendency: in spite of the addresses given by the Agenda 2000, the PRUSST programme has left a lot of holes in the management of Italian landscape. If concentrate the attention upon the primary structures of the town is right on one side, on the other the risk is leaving the country in a state of abandon; this lack of rules could keep, in a far date, to the problems that now the USA landscape in facing: urban sprawl. My fear is that in the tentative of concentration on the problems of the town, the country could die, victim of decay and sprawl. The aim of this paper is to deal with the meaning of extra-urban sustainability, with the “form of landscape” and the extension of the concept of sustainability to a wide dimension: the landscape.
The paper addresses an important topic within the process of reviewing the town planning approach into the Italian urban fringes: the relegation or retrocession of areas planned to be urbanized in areas for farming activity. The relevance of this topic consists in facing two of the main problems of rural peri-urban areas, namely the scarcity and the fragmentation of agricultural land, caused by the urban-sprawl policies occurred during the so called "the glorious thirty”, when these areas were conceived as a reserve for new urbanization. Nowadays this status is more and more questioned, according to the contradictory pathways of urban transition and the new priorities postulated by the sustainable planning. Following this trend this paper intends to argue to which extent a return to farming in peri-urban areas can be helped out by an overall review of their land use. To this end, the paper presents the results of a survey conducted on a sample of 30 municipalities of small, medium and large scale, located in many Italian Regions, that are implementing planning operations in order to convert some peripheral areas from urban to agricultural uses. Referring to this sample the paper discusses the impact of the transition in place and the conditions under which it may be effective. It follows that the present process of re-zoning buildable areas into farming areas, although still limited to local experiences and policies, is a large-scaled phenomenon that deserves a major attention from the public planning agencies at urban and regional level. In fact, at these levels more important results might be achieved by reviewing some regulatory and technical tools of urban planning till now not enough exploited. In conclusion, the paper highlights how an 'other' urban planning is possible, indeed it is already being implemented, and provides some points of reference for the work that remains to be done. Key references: Peri-urban agricultural areas, relegation of buildable area
iForest - Biogeosciences and Forestry
In southern Italy many cities are characterized by a lack of public urban greenspaces. Non-urbanized areas in these cities are suffering from surrounding urbanization pressures. These areas still provide important ecosystem services even if they are limited in size, highly fragmented and often neglected by local planning. New planning strategies are needed in order to protect and enhance the provision of ecosystem services delivered by existing Non-Urbanized areas, but municipalities usually have limited funds for acquiring public green areas via land expropriations. At the same time, requests for new urban development are still considerable. Consequently, it is not realistic to propose strategies for green areas that do not include new developments. The paper illustrates a strategy for a Green Oriented Urban Development (GOUD) that has been applied for the Master Plan of Catania, a medium sized city in Sicily (southern Italy). The strategy includes a limited amount of developments ...