Critical infrastructures: challenges ahead for urban and spatial planners

The planning and programming of critical infrastructures such as water, power, gas, and other lifelines have been traditionally divorced from urban and spatial planning for a number of reasons. This divergence that briefly consists in diverging and non-communicating authorities in charge, decisions taken pose serious challenges for both. On the one hand the construction of key components of critical infrastructures are confronted with fierce local opposition that may consistently delay operations, on the other the realization of networks and plants may significantly alter landscapes and also challenge urban development and redevelopment. In principle it would make sense that the two are aligned and accommodated within a common framework but this is not the case neither from a legislative nor from an operational perspective. In the last years we have worked on the topic of critical infrastructures, and in particular in this paper we will focus on the territorial implications of power and telecommunication services and on their safe provision taking into consideration territorial hazards and vulnerabilities. Speaking about territorial implications we mean on the one hand the impact that certain hazards may have on the functioning of critical services and on their physical integrity, on the other we imply the need for orchestrating the development of certain plants and parts of networks with cities’ development and redevelopment. An interesting example of application is provided by datacenter that constitute nowadays a very critical component of digital systems with increasing dependency on cloud services worldwide. Two draft of new European directives are on the table and foreseen for approval within this year to tackle on the one hand the resilience of critical infrastructures as a sector and on the other telecommunication and cyber security. In both cases the physical protection and resilience has to consider the potential impacts of climate change and cascading events.