Rosalba D’Onofrio

In search of new paradigms to interpret and design the contemporary city

In recent decades, the idea has prevailed that sustainable development is not translatable into specific economic and urban transformation objectives alternative to the traditional ones, but should be understood as a long-term process, a set of measures taken to mitigate adverse effects without calling into question the trends underlying cities’ growth. This approach has produced a series of experimental results, only a few cases of which show mature and practical applications to improve the environmental quality and social development of our cities. Today a cultural revolution is needed. The confirmed theoretical complexity of sustainable development and the growing availability of metrics for sustainability and people’s well-being call for a cross-cutting approach to urban planning. It must be able to reinterpret the relationships between different components of the city — physical, environmental, morphological, historical and socio-economic — in a transdisciplinary manner, with the aim of ensuring the overall sustainability of the changes. The proposed approach (applied in the town of Pineto, Italy), views the city as an “urban organism” structured in multiple intertwined layers, i.e., an evolutionary system whose meaning is higher than the sum of its parts, and which requires dynamic analysis and integral solutions to ensure sustainability. In this view, a comprehensive dynamic analysis and the contribution of multiple integrated disciplinary skills (such as thermodynamics, ecology, statistical mechanics, technological sciences, economics, sociology, urban planning and architectural composition) are essential for identifying rules to ensure the balance and sustainability of change regarding the maintenance and

The Ideal Adriatic City

This experimentation deals with the Adriatic city and the city of Ancona in particular, a city of about 100,000 inhabitants situated along the Adriatic coast in the Marche Region. This choice is related to the deep knowledge that the research group has of the territory and its landscape, which facilitated the collection of data and the understanding of characteristic phenomena. This does not mean that the research results are applicable only to this specific urban context. What we propose is a means of interpreting the city based on morphology, which can act as an intermediary between many other European urban contexts and as a point to begin applying the tool, as well as a basis on which the forum activities may be developed.

Use of Decision-Support Systems in Defining Scenarios for Sustainable, Shared Urban Development

The subject of sustainability requires the integration of various areas of disciplinary knowledge and in particular, knowledge related to the overall management and dynamics of ecological and social systems. Traditionally, the different disciplines have addressed the theme of sustainability by developing mathematical models and using indicators to measure the different aspects. However, not all of these aspects can be measured in quantitative terms (Bell and Morse 2008; Pollesch and Dale 2015).

The Need for New Urban Planning for Healthy Cities: Reorienting Urban Planning Towards Healthy Public Policy

The role of local public administrations in favoring dialogue among different players—professionals and workers in public health, urban planners, politicians, and the civil community—is fundamental. All these figures can assume common responsibilities in constructing plans and projects for the city, overcoming the gap between different skills, approaches, and languages. What is certain is that the role of the central (national) government in health policies and city planning cannot be ignored: national approaches, laws, and regulations affect local plans and policies. Some experiments made in recent years in Finland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, etc., on attempts to integrate urban planning and health have felt the effects of some important innovations on the central level [public-health reforms, national recommendations, guidelines on the Health Impact Assessment (HIA), etc.]. Other countries, such as France and Italy, began to address these themes only a few years ago, and on the national level, legislative references are still lacking. Little experimentation has been made in the field, and the experiments carried out have mostly regarded the application of the HIA to individual plans and projects. At any rate, there is growing interest even in these countries.

Selection of Indicators of Urban Sustainability and Quality of Life of City Inhabitants

The quality of European landscapes and the quality of life of city inhabitants are closely related to economic, social, and cultural aspects that are manifest in time and space. This connection, interacting with the local economy, responds to the recreational, emotional, and spiritual needs and the sense of identity of the community, as the Mercer survey and Eurobarometer have highlighted. If our cities are unsustainable, as often happens, the urban landscape could/should become the litmus paper that allows the state of places to be synthetically interpreted and supports the delineation of indications to solve the problems (Benson and Roe 2007). When following this road, it is necessary to consider the technical aspects of sustainability policies—such as energy savings, recycling, environmental management, etc.—and non-technical aspects such as social behaviours and spatial organization. All of these aspects together, in addition to the way in which they interact, contribute to determining the characteristics of a given urban landscape and the quality of life of city inhabitants. The continuous “feedback” between sustainability and quality of the urban landscape and their interaction with the quality of life of city inhabitants have been the subject of numerous studies and reflections in the contemporary scientific panorama. In this respect, the 2010 book by Claudia Dinep and Kristin Schwab Sustainable Site Design Criteria, Process, and Case Studies for Integrating Site and Region in Landscape Design highlights how “…urban sustainability is fundamentally the sustainability of the urban landscape as a whole”. In a 2004 essay, MacKendrick and Parkins maintained that the sustainability of the urban landscape could be defined as the capacity of a landscape system to generate and maintain conditions for a safe, harmonious, and adequate environment of life that respects ecosystems (MacKendrick and Parkins 2004).

Goals, Opportunities and Limits to the European Healthy Cities Network

The history of European cities reflects the close, complex ties that unite urban planning and human health. An effective remedy against epidemics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, city planning has, paradoxically, contributed to the appearance of many problems related to the health and well-being of people in the modern era. In September 2012, the European Member States of the WHO adopted “Health 2020”, a strategic policy framework for the twenty-first century. Health 2020 explicitly recognizes the influence of the urban environment on health and the role of healthy cities and national networks in carrying forward the objectives and themes of this European strategy. Health 2020 also recognizes the emblematic role of the leadership of local governments in the development of health. Urban planning should address this activism in European cities and the need to overcome what can be defined as the risk of “projectism”, the risk of a short-term vision relying on isolated interventions rather than long-term programs or policies that can profoundly modify the organization of contemporary urban models in favor of the health and well-being of city inhabitants.

The QLandQLife Forum

The expectations and desires of populations regarding the quality of their living environment place them in a strategic position to plan urban choices in their territory. It is extremely important that actions to protect and enhance the landscape and to improve the quality of life in urban areas fall within an overall strategy of local development that identifies the priorities for intervention and the consequent actions to perform with the community’s contribution.

Comparing European Cities on the Road to Integrating Health and Urban Planning

The effective difficulty of intersecting the themes of health and well-being within urban-planning tools and how much, instead, this relationship is desirable even for the goals of promoting sustainable development, suggests investigating the theme with the aid of some current experiments in European cities, selecting some key questions around which the wager on integration is made. The comparison regards essentially medium or small cities (Belfast, Bristol, Ljubljana, Odense, Pecs, Poznan, Rennes, Turku, Modena, Udine); an inter-municipal association (Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, PACA); and two metropolitan areas (Turin and Bologna). The results of this research mainly regard the content of the urban plans from the strategic to the operational levels with reference to the themes of health and well-being. In addition, aspects connecting the plans’ choices to the realization of interventions to design the places and empower local communities are investigated. Appendix 2 presents three of these experiences: Bristol’s Parks and Green Space Strategy; Rennes’ Restructuration de la Halte Ferroviaire de Pontchaillou; Healthy Poznan—Development Strategy for the River Warta; and the Hirvensalo District Master Plan.

For a New Urban Governance

The economic/financial recession that has affected the cities and economy of the west is forcing a rethinking about the current model of development and planning a return to governance policies based on enhancing territorial, local, and urban capital. It is not possible for this to occur in terms of further growth, accumulation, and the consumption of scarce resources. Instead, it is necessary to design polycentric, denser cities, regulating the reuse of land to a multifunctional dimension, reconfiguring spaces, and producing more resilient, adaptive, and quality urban fabrics. Cities, in that they are social organizations created to be functional for humans’ many needs, could become the space in which citizens find answers to their demands for well-being and quality of life. In this sense, cities have found it necessary to address some substantial questions in new and creative ways. These questions relate to: Waste reduction and a more efficient use of resources (human capital, land, landscape worth, environmental quality, energy) Conservation and the hydrogeological balance of the land Greater sobriety and effectiveness in urban planning Reorganization of material and immaterial infrastructure networks Involving a larger number of subjects and new players in transformation and regeneration processes Building ethics of collective goods to ensure real sustainability in enhancement processes and the use of these goods to block their irreversible consumption Redefining behaviours, habits, and lifestyles of inhabitants and operators imprinted with a more conscious, responsible use of their territory.

Health Promotion and Urban Sustainability: A Perspective on Duality

The correlation between human health and sustainability/climate change is the fruit of more than twenty years of research activities in Europe. Health creates the conditions for sustainability while simultaneously being conditioned by it, just as sustainability, intended as environmental, economic, and social sustainability, creates and is conditioned by human health. The two concepts, in theory as well as in practice, cannot be separated, but should be understood as interdependent. This means that strategies oriented towards sustainable development should be correlated with strategies to promote health and vice versa. In this sense, experiences within Europe (London, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Malmo, Rotterdam, and Turin, to name a few) and the rest of the world (Boston, Jakarta, Medellin, New Orleans, New York) constitute an interesting record for extrapolation with respect to some keywords running in the direction of health and quality of life in cities: environmental and social safety, public spaces and inclusive cities, and meaningful design references, on both large and small scales.