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Urbanization is an onerous human activity: it affects municipal budget and foremost it costs the environment. Nevertheless, an ever-growing number of people (more than 75% of the European population) is living in cities and towns, so that identifying sustainable urban development solutions is a dramatically urgent need. Already in the 70s, some researches proposed parameters to evaluate urbanization costs in Italy, but they mainly focused on the economic and financial sustainability of real estate development. The land value capturing approaches proved to be inadequate when municipal budgets are facing growing social unbalances and critical environmental threats. The question being not just “where the money for urban infrastructures could come from”, but also “what could be a more sustainable development model”. In any case, now we are forced to rethink the whole organization of our urban life to defend ourselves from largely unknown threats, pandemics, COVID-19 being probably one among others that we could face in the near future. It is not yet clear if a link exists between the spread of the virus, the health consequences and the environmental conditions, but what probably will need to be assessed is the effect of population density on the spread of contamination. Even the traditional provision of services and public spaces will need to be defined again in order to protect and serve urban population. New evidences will force planners to redefine their thoughts and schemes. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2020: Special Issue. Covid-19 vs City-20

This paper explores the feasibility of adopting ecological based planning in low-income residential development. It explicates that in developing countries efforts by housing authorities have been on housing provision irrespective of the environmental threats to sustainability. As these houses are built, future of urban ecology is under threat. The questions regarding this phenomenon are several: how do low-income populations perceive environmental issues of urban settlements? How capable and willing are the local authorities to embrace and apply ecological based planning in residential development? What are the facilitating instruments of ecological-based planning? What are the prospects of integrating ecological based planning to low-income residential development? What are the restraining factors towards embracement of ecological based planning and how best can they be harnessed towards future ecological cities? The case study of Hatcliffe residential area in Harare shows that there are many challenges to overcome uncoordinated planning approaches, ineffective policies and legislative frameworks, weak institutional settings, financial constraints, outdated planning standards and regulations, poverty, lack of environmental stewardship and lack of political will among others. The study findings call for robust environmental conservation strategies, strong environmental stewardship, responsive institutional and funding mechanism backed by realistic legislative frameworks and robust policy rectification. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, Vol 7, N° 1 (2014): Smart Cities Challenges: Smart Environment for Sustainable Resource Management

Contemporary cities have to deal with numerous challenges, from the growth and aging of urban populations to the scarcity of resources; from environmental degradation to climate change. The latter, also due to the increasing severity of climate-related impacts on urban areas, is widely considered one of the most urgent challenges for urban development in the near future: cities are the main contributors to energy consumption and GHG emissions, paying, at the same time, the highest price for the climate impacts. Thus, climate issues have gained increasing importance in the last decades, both in terms of the metaphors coined by scholars relative to urban future (low-carbon cities, transition cities, smart cities, resilient cities, etc.) and in terms of the initiatives undertaken on different institutional levels. Unfortunately, mitigation and adaptation are generally regarded as two different approaches, neglecting the potential synergies and trade-offs between the related strategies. Hence, based on the growing awareness of the need for mainstreaming mitigation and adaptation policies at city level, this study will provide an overview of the state of the art of the mitigation and adaptation initiatives in Italian metropolitan cities. Then, focusing on the concepts of the “smart” and the “resilient” city – recognized as key concepts for reducing CO2 emissions and improving the ability of cities to respond to climate impacts – and with reference to a conceptual framework for building up a smart and resilient urban system carried out in previous research works (Papa et al., 2015), the study will examine case studies of the cities of Rotterdam and Barcelona, highlighting how this framework may improve our understanding and, above all, contribute to better integration of the fragmented on-going strategies and initiatives. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2015: ECCA 2015 - Smart and Resilient Cities. Ideas and Practices from the South of Europe

On a worldwide scale, cities and regions must tackle the challenges set by the radical change in our society and in our economy, aiming to develop effective public policies and boost their managerial, evaluation and planning skills. Anyway, it is essential to put a new idea of city at the centre of the smart strategies in order to bring policies back to their former central position, since technologies alone cannot generate welfare and prosperity. Local leadership, integrated planning and a rich social fabric go hand in hand, the social capital being able to produce an added value for the cities. We are exactly in a new phase of urban growth centred on the economy of services characterized by widespread digital technologies and new innovative organization patterns, which encourage the participation in the civic policy processes through the realization of structures to share information and data so as to define intervention policies. The most recent studies and trials about innovation and competitiveness, such as the examples illustrated in the present work (Amsterdam, Paredes, Aarhus and Gent) show a growing interest in measuring the relationship between innovation and economic growth at various territorial levels, key factors in conceiving inclusive smart strategies, linked to principles of sustainability and territorial cohesion, and building smarter cities. In the light of these remarks, the article is divided into three parts: the first part is focussed on the above-mentioned central issues of the international debate; the second part examines four significant European initiatives; the third part draws preliminary conclusions and directions for further research. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, Vol 6, N° 1 (2013): Smart Cities: Researches, Projects and Good Practices for the City

Rapidly growing cities following The Industrial Revolution remained insufficient to fulfill today's necessities. Also, natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods or unsound structures have affected the development of cities adversely. Although natural disasters can be unpredictable, the issue of preparing cities for natural disasters, planning cities and regulating laws accordingly are becoming increasingly crucial. Urban regeneration activities are one of these preventions taken in this purpose. It is observed that countries such as Turkey, faced with natural disasters intensively, suffer from serious physical, financial and moral losses. Therefore, urban renewal activities have gained importance in Turkey after The Gölcük Earthquake (7.4Mw) and The Düzce Earthquake (7.2Mw) in 1999. The first urban regeneration project in Kocaeli where was one of the cities experiencing hard collapses of these earthquakes is about to be completed. Research of the principles of urban sustainability and resiliency in urban regeneration practices, which are priority issues due to natural disaster risks, has come into prominence. It is important not only to make urban areas more resistant to disasters but also to design according to social, economic and ecological criteria to make more livable. In this study, social, health, green, transportation and educational areas of the first urban regeneration area in Kocaeli were examined in terms of the basic needs of the city. For this purpose, pre and post-project zoning plans are analyzed and transferred to the GIS. The areal changes in the above-mentioned needs are evaluated for changing population density and their sufficiencies are compared. TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, Vol 12 No 1 (2019): The Times They Are a-Changin'

Cities significantly contribute to climate change while at the same time have government capacity to efficiently act in the fields of mitigation and adaptation. Their climate capacity is being increasingly recognized by international institutions and has been pointed out as crucial in the multi-level government scenario of the European Union (EU). Addressing the challenges of climate change at urban level is a complex issue which requires a holistic approach to strategic urban planning. Understanding why and how cities start action can help to identify the barriers they face when addressing climate change, and how national governments, regions and international bodies can support local authorities in their climate fight. This work aims to contribute to the provision of knowledge necessary to have a better and deeper insight in urban climate action. The study investigates the state-of-art of urban climate plans in two countries, Spain and Italy, which share similarities on many levels (i.e. cultural, geographical, climate vulnerabilities, urban configurations and institutional framework). The research analyses 26 Spanish cities and 32 Italian cities included in the Eurostat Urban Audit (UA), focusing on the actions taken by big and medium municipalities in reducing their contribution to climate change and to become more resilient to changing weather patterns. The results of the analysis show a trend towards an increasing awareness on climate mitigation (highly focused on energy efficiency and the promotion of cleaner energy sources), while adaptation remains an incipient local policy area in both countries. The analysis identifies also the beneficial influence of national and international climate city networks. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2015: ECCA 2015 - Smart and Resilient Cities. Ideas and Practices from the South of Europe

This research aims at identifying main risk factors on rural areas, investigating characteristics both of the stressor and of the system, providing ordinary planning with tools that are useful in a preventive perspective and not only in emergency conditions. Local vulnerability assessment is a key tool able to provide a framework for prioritizing choices and actions in different strategies and policies. In literature, many studies focus on the assessment of local vulnerability, but there are few directly site-specific methods concerning climate change as stressor in rural areas, although they are particularly vulnerable contexts to climate change. Vulnerability of rural areas is principally linked to their significant dependence on agriculture sector and to specific socio-economic dynamics, often responsible of inequalities within communities. Starting from these assumptions, authors define a methodology to quantitatively assess, in rural areas, the level of vulnerability to climate change based on climatic and context analysis at the municipality scale. The methodology is based on numerical and statistical computation operations on a set of indicators of climate exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity in order to provide an aggregate Vulnerability Index. The paper presents the results of the application to the Calabrian territorial context of the Grecanica Area (Italy). TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2021: Special Issue. The emergency plan for the use and management of the territory

Climate change, energy issues and urban population growth are among the main themes on which the scientific debate focuses today. Over the last decades, the literature has proposed different approaches to face these challenges. This paper focuses on two widely debated approaches: the smart and the resilient city paradigms, that continue to draw the attention of scholars and institutional bodies worldwide. The need to find strategies to reduce energy consumption and mitigate climate change impacts has been a prerequisite for the Smart Energy Master project for territorial governance of energy. One of the results is the Urban Saving Energy Model that "looks” at the several characteristics of a city in an integrated manner. This paper presents the results of a scientific and technical procedure that, starting from a thorough investigation of the physical and environmental characteristics of the city of Naples, has identified which variables have the greatest effect on energy consumption. The results have shown that the possibility of identifying an "ideal" sustainable urban form, able to maximize energy efficiency, still remains theoretical, opening up the possibility that there are different consumption patterns due to the different physical, environmental and building characteristics of urban areas. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2015: ECCA 2015 - Smart and Resilient Cities. Ideas and Practices from the South of Europe