Resilient landscapes for cities of the future

Cities of the 21st century must face several major challenges, which range from overcoming risks due to climate change (closely connected to progressively developing ecological imbalances) to the search for better energy conservation in the urban machine; from improvement in the quality and quantity of open spaces to returning residual areas (neglected areas, urban remnants, etc.) to the city. Thus far, there has been a lack of global solutions to improve the vulnerability of our cities or counteract external stresses that cities face now and will face even more in the coming decades. Faced with these profound changes, the rationalistic urban vision is no longer current. It is based on the mono- functional division of human activities and has led to the definition of plans and projects that are neither very effective in managing urban and territorial phenomena nor very adaptable in terms of external shocks caused by sudden climate, ecological, and economic changes. Today approaches that produce resilient landscapes are imposed on the city and territory through policies, plans, and projects characterized by imprinting flexibility (self-regulating, dynamic instruments in continual evolution), retroactivity (multi -scale, incremental, cumulative instruments), and ecological sustainability (adaptable, qualitative and recyclable, compensatory instruments). Resilient urban landscapes will be indicators of the good health of the territory, the effect of policies, plans, and projects centred on the protection and development of natural cycles, the liveability of cities, sustainable mobility, territorial culture and identity, safety, and the health of people. In this edition of UNISCAPE En-Route, we use the Adriatic City as an important terrain to observe and confront factors of the crisis in the modern city and its landscape. Studying the Adriatic City allows possible exit strategies from the model of the rationalistic city to be proposed in search of new forms of more sustainable urban development aimed at improving the quality of life for people in Europe. The principal longitudinal development of the Adriatic settlement system, essentially due to the concentration of the main economic activities (tourism, industry, specialized agriculture) following the main infrastructures along the coast (all in a north-south direction), has generated a series of conflicts in the last fifty years that emerge today in all their criticality. Important environmental and landscape criticalities can be observed (the process of artificialization constitutes an ecological and aesthetic/perceptual barrier between the sea and inland areas) along with the loss of historic and socioeconomic links that once determined continuity (also functional) between the coast and inland areas. Ever more often the theme of coastal artificialization places huge problems in the safety of dwellings against the catastrophic effects of climate change; industrial decommissioning and the housing bubble represent the main effects of the current economic crisis. Due to the loss of identity in built and natural landscapes in Adriatic territories, intervention policies and experimental projects are being developed that place the objective of responding to precise logic of improving the landscape, anthropic, cultural, and productive identity of each territorial reality through the activation of development processes that do not present negative effects related to the constituent elements of such identities. Starting from the Adriatic case study, this international seminar will confront the policies, plans, and projects of European cities and territories in order to affirm a new development model that produces resilient landscapes via: - overcoming the mere conservation of the landscape, considering its evolutionary processes and the need to connect policies for the conservation of goods and natural and cultural resources with plans and projects for territorial transformation; - social participation in landscape management processes, since resilience is a process that cannot be completely planned and designed, but must be pursued by directing voluntary actions; - the consolidation of new urban and territorial governance, aimed at integrating the different scales of territorial and landscape government; - institutional and social flexibility to adapt policies, projects, and actions to innovative socioeconomic and landscape processes (also by activating synergies between local public and private resources).