Piero Pedrocco (p)

Stefano Aragona

Starting from three educational experiments conducted at the University of Udine, the contribution attempts to identify a new viable path for urban planning. It is a matter of moving from the key diagram to the urban project and urban design, equipped with models and volumes, and then going back, questioning the urban project to draft a local neighborhood plan. At the basis of the reasoning conducted is a reversal of the traditional urban planning process. This usually starts from the plan that offers homogeneous zones to the market on which to expand or complete the consolidated city. Here, on the contrary, starting from a possible example of an idealized city, we want to put it into question with the plan, which is inspired by it.
It is therefore proposed to identify models of future cities, respectful of the models of the past, returning to the compactness and livability of the Italian Renaissance city and more generally of the European city. And this without undermining the need for an architecture that is always innovative and in step with the times. In this way it is also treated the theme of land consumption, linking it to a better balance between city and countryside. An equilibrium put in difficulty by the sprawl of the last decades, with the random spread of civil and industrial buildings throughout the territory of the plain between the consolidated cities.
The contribution proceeds through the examples of the projects carried on, which, although utopian and didactic, are focused on the concrete research of new ways and methods of planning the future city. A research that could provide, even if in littler districts, useful results for the practice, even without the need to change too much the current planning laws.

Giusepper Pace (p)

Stefano Aragona

Underground Built Heritage (UBH) is a unique cultural resource, context-specific and characterised by an historical and cultural exclusivity, which influences people’s sense of belonging and of ‘ownership’ of particular localities, as well as daily routines, local rituals, traditions, and atmospheres. Its significance contributes to individual and collective identity, social cohesion and inclusion, and represent a valuable resource for the sustainability challenge. In particular, it has the potential of catalysing urban/rural regeneration, raising community awareness and making local communities more resilient to globalised systems of production and consumption by preserving their unique environmental and cultural aspects. Although UBH success stories have captured the attention of the world, this resource’s valorisation finds relevant constraints, such as knowledge gaps and geotechnical and geo-environmental concerns. This paper takes origin by the recently started Cost Action CA18110 “Underground Built Heritage as catalyser for Community Valorisation” (2019-2023). As main reference for promoting a UBH sustainable use, it uses UNESCO “Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL)”. It implies the application of a range of traditional and innovative tools, based on civic engagement, knowledge and planning tools, regulatory systems, and financial tools to adapt to different local contexts and built heritage. However, the HUL approach demands for a cultural transition to make planning systems mature. This process can be considered as a sustainability transition, which requires further changes in society and implies complex and uncertain processes, mainly depending on experimentation, learning and sharing ideas. These processes demand to acquire and test tools for encouraging dialogue and engaging stakeholders across society, by stimulating and facilitating communities’ empowerment and connecting natural, social, cultural, political and economic environments, gauging impacts across different spheres of life, and grasping the importance not only of ‘hard’ but also of ‘soft’ infrastructures”. The paper investigates two community management tools - such as Strategic Stakeholder Dialogue (SSD) and Transition Management (TM), and their integration into a new tool, the Strategic Transition Management (STM), based on local communities’ experiments and empowerment, and a multi-level strategic dialogue (e.g. Living Labs). Finally, it describes objectives and outcomes, which reveal practices, imaginaries and local cultures associated with the UBH, renews interpretation, and stimulates new knowledge and the perspective vision of local communities. UHB landscape might become a place of equilibrium for nature, identity and attractiveness, by re-associating multiple uses and giving capacity for development at all levels and all temporalities while generating positive and self-sustaining "natural" interdependencies.

Romina D'Ascanio (p), Anna Laura Palazzo

Stefano Aragona

The so-called ‘Inner Areas’ have been defined by the Ministry of Economy in 2012 as areas far away from urban centers and a full range of facilities such as education, mobility and healthcare services, suffering over the last decades from depopulation and ageing, poor job and welfare opportunities.
Measures targeted at safeguarding and rehabilitating inner areas, that make up for approximately 60% of the country’s surface area and 13.5 million people, have been deemed necessary to counteract negative demographic trends.
Heritage and nature are both at stake, due to high presence of small historic cities gathering dense and complex heritage assets, and protected areas as well. When it comes to the institution of protected areas, conservation issues are to be met with sustainable living and settlement requirements in order to counteract demographic trends. As a matter of fact, Italy, with almost 3 million hectares and over 10% of protected areas, has made a relevant contribution to the implementation of the Natura 2000 European network.
In the Lazio Region, covered with protected areas for about 11%, the very idea of park lends itself to a positive dialogue between the natural sciences and the humanities. This contribution will delve into the mainstream debate related to the Inner areas, stressing some considerations in the case of the Natural Reserve of the Navegna and Cervia Mountains, set apart from the Roman metropolitan area but close enough to benefit from its agglomerations economies. Inhere the main actor, the Park itself, is struggling to promote an inclusive approach addressing both territorial production and landscape reproduction, encouraging bottom-up development paths drawing upon the natural capital and its vast reservoir of biodiversity.

Pietro Rovigatti (p)

Stefano Aragona

The agreement signed in Havana, in 2016, between the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) and the Central Government of Colombia - one of the emerging economic and social countries of Latin America, richest in biodiversity and natural resources - it has not only closed more than fifty years of social, environmental, economic and military conflicts, ending, perhaps forever, a war-filled season of crimes and tragic consequences for civilian populations, long believed to be infinite. He also put on the black and white a long list of commitments between the parties in conflict, among which are those of a territorial and economic nature, destined, in the intentions of the contracting parties to the agreement, to design a new strategic territorial structure in vast regions of the country, predominantly agricultural and forest pastoral, called “deep Colombia” (F. Diaz Diaz D. Unigarro, 2018).

It is also of interest to note that within the Peace Agreement in question the word “plan”, understood both in terms of the socio-economic program and of territorial development and rebirth, and also as a program of works of evident significance and territorial value, appears many times. For example, with regard to a Nation Plan for the development of third level infrastructures, or for the defence against integral risk, or in support of rural communities, real victims of the conflict.

But three years after the signing of this agreement, what is now the state of planning and implementation of these programs, and how these programs have tried to conceive, and put into effect, an idea of a new territory project, linked to a hypothesis of economic transition, territorial reorganization and ecological progress in the territories of the post-Colombian armed conflict?

The paper tries to answer this question starting from the examination of the context conditions and the analysis of the programs of territorial government, and in light of the radical processes of economic transition under way, focusing on the case study of the Department of Guaviare, placed at the threshold of the Colombian Amazon region, and specifically in the “vereda” of Charrasquera and Charras, in the municipality of San José del Guaviare, object of a recent international participatory planning workshop that is illustrated here as an experience of interest in the transition path to the post fossil (and the overcoming of the cocalera economy) nowadays in some regions of the country.