City Design and sustainability. Could Italy lead the way?

As city design plays an increasingly fundamental role in making our living, working and urban environments more sustainable, this paper aims to discuss the role of cities in achieving more sustainable development. The first step is to clarify what we define with the word sustainability and how this concept evolved from the 1970s to our days, widening its meaning and extending its range to everything that is related with better quality of life. Furthermore, this paper argues that quality of life is tightly intertwined with quality of spaces. Building on top of this assumption, this paper analyze the role of cities in achieving sustainability. UN statistic forecasts reveals that future world’s population will be ever more urban, therefore sustainable development will becoming increasingly related to cities growth. Cities are actually key assets in order to achieve sustainability in terms of environmental preservation. But what about quality of life? The paper compares how sustainability is applied with different approach in the US and the Italian context and why. Finally this article argues that Italy has an incredible know-how and an extraordinary cultural heritage related to city-making. Know- how derived from the 1950s experience of building public funded neighborhoods around historic cities. Still today some of these neighborhoods stand out for quality of architectural and planning design. Ultimately, Italy, strong of its extraordinary heritage has the chance to lead the way, moving the concept of sustainability to a higher meaning that embraces quality spaces and quality of life.