Fabiola Fratini (p), Michela Lisi, Ambra Bernabò Silorata

[Please, see "extended abstract" - this is the short one]

“San Lorenzo Urban Lab” (DICEA – Sapienza University) experiments a local regeneration process aimed to enhancing the quality of life while addressing climate change and social challenges through Natural Based Solutions (NBS) within a Green Infrastructure Network (GIN). This experimentation arises from an international, multidisciplinary research, involving Université Sorbonne, local associations and stakeholders.
NBS can deliver sustainable, flexible (in timing and function), low cost alternatives to standard city-making tools. This research aims at co-creating the city starting from its hollows texture where tiny, temporary, fast, low cost and easy to achieve actions drive the local regeneration. Moving “small steps” provides a gradual evolution of the process by implementing and testing NBS to produce real changes within a short horizon. Introducing NBS as a tool for driving changes, here and now, enlightens potentialities of green solutions to deliver ecosystem services and therefore contribute to enhance climate change adaptation, social cohesion, wellbeing and health.
Transitional solutions allow to experiment with the local community which approaches and uses fit the best to reactivate the specific area before a definitive and effective project is achieved. Such actions such actions, can be a successful approach to get the community and the administration to begin to commit.
A vademecum of principles for a sustainable regeneration is drawn up on punctual (oasis), nature-boosting (green) and interconnected (network) small actions listed as a series of solutions which are specific and targetable. Oasis are experimental, open, evolving and shared regenerations taking places through a “bio-social-urban-acupuncture”. Network is a chance to promote new green functions in reclaimed micro-spaces where activities will encourage new green and social practices. Public and private spaces once not accessible can be vibrantly brought back to beneficiate the community through collective use and maintenance. Such quality and diverse urban space gets people out on the streets to friendly colonise a new greened fabric, sustaining a civic and responsible action to keep care each one of the other and of the shared places.
The “San Lorenzo Urban Lab” experience explores how a local community can be driven into an innovative co-designed process, how to diffuse a sustainable urban approach to regeneration, how NBS can be a tool to facilitate the process and the community involvement.

Stefania Portoghesi Tuzi (p)

Italy is a particularly rich and complex country and boasts one of the most important artistic and cultural heritages in the world, made up of large cities with grandiose monuments and at the same time small, apparently minor towns, which preserve exceptional works of art. The countless riches it contains have made it one of the main tourism destinations. There are many factors that have made our country one of the preferred travel destinations, among these the Cinema that has made a large number of people known and attracted to our artistic and architectural as well as cultural heritage. Thanks also to the influence of cinema, a new phenomenon has emerged in recent decades: the journey properly so-called - intended as a way to get to know and establish deep contacts with territories and people met in respect of places - has replaced tourism and, in in particular, mass tourism, where the search for fun and entertainment is central in terms of leisure-time consumerism. However, another form of tourism that can be defined as responsible and sustainable has developed alongside it, which starts from three components: environmental, socio-economic, cultural. Over the years, the debate on this issue has grown; for this reason, the theme of the relationship between cultural heritage and sustainable development is at the center of the United Nations agenda for post-2015.


Starting from the reflection on the negative impacts of mass tourism, alternative models have also been developed and tested in Italy that enhance the potential of responsible tourism, which does not compromise the environmental, cultural and social heritage of the territory, involving institutions, economic operators and tourists together and local communities.
The goal is to minimize negative impacts and maximize positive ones for the environment and local communities, making the latter protagonists of their development.
During the course of the work, the current situation will be analyzed through a reflection on mass tourism in large cities of art and on responsible and sustainable tourism, showing the economic consequences in some examples of "good practices".

Francesca Silvia Rota (p), Cristiana Cabodi

With the UN 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement the global governance for sustainable ddevelopment turned from a hierarchically ordered system of regulatory mechanisms, to a system based on goals and results. The old rule-based mechanisms are complemented and replaced by open negotiation processes and new deliberative arenas in which a crucial role is played by coherence of action (Kanie et al., 2019), joint responsibility between the public and the private sectors (Abbott, 2012), and institutional learning (Steele, 2011). Critical with the simplifying of sustainability to a single non-hierarchical list of objectives, in the paper we argue that it couldn’t exist just one discourse on sustainability (Krueger & Agyeman, 2005; MacGillivray & Franklin, 2015). Although a general framework of action is necessary, at the basis of our study there is the belief that each territory should formulate its own specific model of sustainable development, via mechanisms of open territorial governance. Strategies, plans and programs do come later.
In fact, it is in the concreteness of territories that the abstract (sometimes naïve) goal of sustainability acquires concreteness in its turn, and functionality. Also, it is in the territories that the problem of the harmonization of goals requiring regulatory mechanisms (e.g. the UN sustainable development goals on energy, water, the protection of the oceans and the climate) and goals necessitating 'softer' regimes (Haughton & Allmendinger, 2008) can be solved.
Moving from these assumptions, the paper questions about the most appropriate territorial “scale” or "container" to organise the deliberative arenas of the goal-based governance for sustainability. Taking the case of the governance of green infrastructures, the paper compares the case of the Corona Verde in Italy (Turin, Piedmont), the project for the management and development of the peri-urban green areas surrounding the City of Turin, with other analogous experiences in Europe. The results of this comparison are then put in relation with the outcomes of the SWOT analysis of the governance system of the project Corona Verde and the study of the concurrent modification of the economic and institutional framework, in search for some general considerations on the usefulness of green infrastructures as governance labs of sustainability.