• Energy Research

This paper discusses the topic of urban and spatial planning in Italy where decision-making is left almost exclusively to the innumerable, small municipalities present in the country and totaling almost 8000 in number. Projects and actions to transform built areas, infrastructure, and welfare services of all sorts and purposes in a national territory of over 300,000 km2 are supervised by countless mayors, municipal councils, and boards that govern plots of land corresponding to polygons of a few kilometers per side. This is generally achieved by means of town plans developed outside of any general rule or protocol, the contents of which are often ignored as a result of national legislation that weakens them and sometimes makes them uninfluential essentially. This is a European example of urban planning mismanagement that deserves to be brought to the broader attention of the European technical and scientific community, also because the debate developed so far on this topic—even by eminent and authoritative urban planners—has been published almost entirely in Italian only. Public and political attention towards this issue is extremely limited, although the severe effects of “molecular planning” are beginning to be perceived: unjustified overurbanization and highly patchy, energy-intensive, urban patterns that are destructive for ecosystems and at odds with public interests regarding environmental and urban quality. In this paper, we make some comparisons with other European countries and outline some directions—certainly very difficult to follow—to reconsider and recover from the adverse effects produced to date.

Inner areas are the most peripheral Italian municipalities and they are characterized by clear loss of both public and private services. They represent one of the relevant elements in national and regional planning policy and the Italian government has made available a fund (€ 100 million) for small municipalities up to 5000 inhabitants (Law n. 158/2017). These areas have gradually seen an evident process of marginalisation, which is difficult to evaluate because it is the result of several factors. This work describes an applied methodology for this marginality assessment on the Italian inner areas, which was developed through the quantification of eight criteria selected from Law n. 158/2017. The analysis carried out two different simulations for elaborating and mapping territorial disadvantages, with the use of GIS software and MATLAB. The analysis highlights an evident clustering in specific geographic areas. Moreover, this result confirms that there is a significant chaining of some typical issues of the small municipalities. This research represents a first analytical approach to evaluating the intervention priorities of regulatory instruments and national strategies and it is proposed as an innovative approach that introduces a profound change of attitude moving from an equality-based model to an equity-based model.

The research presented in the work is linked to important production of data over 10 years of activity that allowed us to trace the configuration of Italian urban settlements in the 1950s. Starting from this information, the paper puts forward a uchronian reconstruction of the physiognomy of the national territory asking if—instead of the weak urban development policies implemented for over half a century—a more purposeful method of planning and designing settlements had been chosen in the Sixties to favor their aggregation and protect the country’s huge landscape heritage. From the model used, important indications emerge for control and management of retrofit (de-sprinkling) policies of which the need has been felt in recent years, as suggested by repeated messages from European bodies, the scientific community, associations and some politicians. The uchronic scenario is constructed starting from the settlement configuration of the 1950s, developing a model of maximum aggregation for the urbanized parts that were intervened in between this period and 2000, simulating a geography that maintains the quantities of soil transformed over the last 50 years. It emerges from the processing of the data that the Italian territory would have retained its low settlement density areas almost intact at the same level as in the 50s, that is to say 73% of the entire peninsular territory. It would also have preserved a large part of its free peninsular and insular coastline at about 60–70%, against the present day 45%.

This paper presents research which has defined a new typology of urban patterns (sprinkling), different from the internationally recognized standard urban sprawl, as well as various indicators that have been implemented to measure sprinkling. It is important to highlight that the damage caused to the environment and communities by urban sprinkling is much more serious and irreversible than that notoriously caused by urban sprawl. The paper introduces the difficult methodological and planning aspects of retrofitting (de-sprinkling), a true challenge for land management. We argue that even partial inversion of many negative effects is impossible in the short term. Only medium- to long-term, organized, and politically coordinated programs can tackle the various issues associated with sprinkling.

The land transformation process in the last decades produced the urbanization growth in flat and coastal areas all over the world. The combination of natural phenomena and human pressure is likely one of the main factors that enhance coastal dynamics. These factors lead to an increase in coastal risk (considered as the product of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) also in view of future climate change scenarios. Although each of these factors has been intensively studied separately, a comprehensive analysis of the mutual relationship of these elements is an open task. Therefore, this work aims to assess the possible mutual interaction of land transformation and coastal management zones, studying the possible impact on local coastal communities. The idea is to merge the techniques coming from urban planning with data and methodology coming from the coastal engineering within the frame of a holistic approach. The main idea is to relate urban and land changes to coastal management. Then, the study aims to identify if stakeholders’ pressure motivated the deployment of rigid structures instead of shoreline variations related to energetic and sedimentary balances. The influence of coastal protection (described by an indicator taking into account the linear density of the rigid protection extension alongshore) measures have been considered. Finally, the economical performances in the period just after the land transformation have been studied by means of a dimensionless index based on the concept of the local unit. The method has been applied to the case study of the Abruzzo Region. Results reveal a large urbanization growth and a generalized over-protection of the coast with a resulting spatial alternation of shoreline retreat and advance. On the other hand, the analysis of the local economy reveals that the presence of tourism activities does not necessarily lead to an increase in the local economy. Indeed, the most important improvement in local economies in the region can be associated with coastal stretches characterized by a high environmental value.

This article relates to the concept of urban expansion reduction in limited areas, called “de-sprinkling districts”, and methods of designation of their range, as well as modelling and management of their network. This concept was developed from research concluded in 2016, referring to 50 years of urban evolution in Italy, that investigated and diagnosed the forms of urban growth focusing on the Italian model. For this model, the authors of this paper proposed an alternative definition (urban sprinkling) with respect to the sprawl international standard. Certainly this urban model established in Italy during the mentioned years is due to an inefficient control of peripheral areas and new conurbations’ development, both in forms and functions. The cause is to be searched for in the importance given to single towns’ general plans and the minor role of strategic planning (province and region). The political and social assumption that urban development according to the extreme sprinkling model is no longer feasible is gaining ground. However, implementing de-sprinkling processes will not be easy. In this paper, criteria to create a decision support system (DSS) for administrators and municipalities is illustrated. These criteria aim at dealing, technically and politically, with sprinkling and planning medium-term containment.

This paper describes a critical situation for Italy, which is one of the causes of the overall disorganization of settlement growth in the past decades. Using the data extracted from some institutional databases, we show that a large part of the national territory is managed with highly effective decision-making tools (such as municipal town planning schemes in Italy), which are, however, lagging behind in their conception and fulfilment of scientific, cultural, and political requirements deemed essential today for effective and sustainable land transformation. Municipalities with plans dating back to a quarter of a century ago, or without any plans, are 1445 in number (17% of the total) and involve 6,200,000 ha of territory (1/5 of Italy) with almost 10 million residents. The territorial changes in these geographical areas, mainly concentrated in the south, are managed with tools based on mid-20th century concepts and techniques, although a large proportion of these territories are demographically active and transform substantial portions of land. Thus, for at least 15–20 years, these territories underwent transformations disconnected from town plans and driven essentially by one-off measures or managed through numerous exceptional and negotiated procedures provided for by national legislation. Today, it seems necessary for southern Italy to overcome its extensive delay in territorial planning, and the drive can only come from national government. This would help it finally respond to current environmental sustainability, risk resilience, and territorial security requirements, through appropriate and technically advanced management procedures not envisaged in previous planning procedures.