The view from urban planning: new landscape scenarios for the changing city

The great ecological, economic, and social changes underway are provoking serious crises on different levels. Cities are becoming ever more vulnerable to external demands, especially because they have always been designed and organized to provide static images and respond to unchangeable balances. Despite the fact that the ability of an organism to adapt and therefore be flexible has been theorized for living systems for some time (Bateson G., 1972), it is late in affecting and seeing applications in the field of urban planning. Tension in civil society, and therefore in cities, had to increase in order for it to become aware of concerns about the future of the planet, which were punctually announced by different international bodies even at the beginning of the 1970s1. Finally, planners, administrators, and even economic entrepreneurs are uniting in a need to increase flexibility for the survival of the system. Naturally, as often occurs, it was precisely the economic sectors, which were at first inattentive to and distant from the ecological questions, that have shown the necessary acceleration for new policies to structure and organize the city and territory. The awareness is that there cannot be economic prosperity in territories subject to ecological crises. In addition, at a time when traditional economies are stagnating globally, the hypothesis of emerging forms of green economy would represent new opportunities to realize less energy-consuming cities. Such cities are also more livable, capable of adapting in real-time to internal and external perturbations, which have been uncontrolled and uncontrollable up to now. It has been convenient, in a broad, extensively shared way, that the increase in urban resilience was the main way for cities to respond to the changes underway. This common interest and view regarding the diagnosis of a sickness that afflicts our cities to be combated through an increase in flexibility, crosses a wide range of possible therapies. Resilience is the capacity of natural, human, social, economic, and institutional systems to react to crises. They therefore not only know how to react to pressures, but also know how to trace new processes of urban and territorial sustainability. Cities and territories are impressed with approaches that enhance and produce resilient landscapes. This is an effect of policies, plans, and projects characterized by elasticity (self-regulating tools that are dynamic and continually evolve), retroactiveness (multi-scale tools that are incremental and cumulative), and ecology (adaptable, qualitative and recyclable, compensatory). In city regeneration processes, the landscape vision becomes the right angle to pursue the objective of resilience. Resilient urban landscapes will be the indicators of the good health of the territory, which is due to policies, plans, and projects centred on protecting and strengthening natural cycles, the livability of cities, sustainable mobility, culture and territorial identity, and safety and personal health. To reach these goals, the rationalist view of the city should be overcome. This includes the monofunctional division of human activities that has led to defining plans and projects that are ineffective at managing urban and territorial phenomena and unadaptable to external shocks caused by climate change and social and economic change (Harvey D., 1990). This reflection is even more poignant when facing large contemporary urban areas where the continuous contamination and confused juxtaposition between city and country already presents ways of overcoming the rigid division of land functions and uses to introduce new means of interaction between parts and components of the city that are different but intimately connected (Gambino R., 1997). When designing new urban and territorial organizations it is necessary to provide more integrated and systemic points of view, especially in these new areas of complexity. This means recognizing that climate, and therefore ecological, changes are not disconnected from social, and therefore economic, changes. In some previous research projects, attention has been focused on the role of open spaces in favouring the formation of more flexible, more adaptive cities (Sargolini M., 2012). Starting from the landscape vision as the way to define local actions capable of linking human activity and nature, we would like to investigate its relationships with urban resilience. The landscape vision can read and make design interpretations (Peano A. et al., 2011): ecological conditions and economic dynamics, aesthetic formalisms, and collective recognition. In this way, the landscape vision is prepared to control not only what could be local actions for urban regeneration in technically circumscribed terms, but also and more in-depth, dynamics and virtuosity to implement so the city’s identity can survive.