Challenges for Contemporary Spatial Planning in Italy. Towards a New Paradigm

The new environmental, ecological and social emergencies affecting the contemporary city and territory of the “Anthropocene” era (Crutzen 2005) have increasingly intense impacts on human well-being and quality of urban life. Emergencies, closely related to regional anthropisation processes, concern issues of adaptation to climate change, risk prevention, and food security. Responding to these challenges requires a shift in strategies and urban design models. In Italy, traditional planning models still prevail, mainly oriented towards governing processes of urban growth and improving regional infrastructures, which strongly affect the availability of natural resources. Even recent planning experiences, focused mostly on the governance of urban redevelopment processes, have been unable to reduce the persisting intensity of urbanisation processes or trigger broader regeneration effects within the increasingly less efficient and less liveable urban fabrics of the built-up city. Nowadays it is necessary to redefine the territorial governance agenda and experiment with a new urban planning paradigm which can address the re-urbanisation of the contemporary city in an ecologically oriented and socially cohesive perspective, guaranteeing the well-being and the quality of citizens’ lives through a robust reconstruction of the urban “natural capital”.