• Energy Research

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.

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.

The following paper examines urban and territorial planning in Italy, where decision-making is entrusted almost exclusively to the almost 8000 small municipalities present in the country. Plans for and the transformation of built-up areas, infrastructure and social services of all types, and serving all purposes in a national territory of more than 300,000 square kilometers, are controlled by a multitude of Mayors, Boards and Municipal Councils that govern plots of land consisting of polygons of a few kilometers per side. This is generally achieved using urban planning tools developed without any general rule or protocol. Often, most of their content is even ignored as a result of national legislation that weakens them, making them largely irrelevant. This is a European example of urban mismanagement that should be brought to the wider attention of the European technical–scientific community because the debate developed so far on this topic—even by eminent and authoritative urban planners—has been almost entirely published in Italian only. Public and political attention around the issue is still extremely limited, although the serious effects of this “molecular planning” are beginning to be perceived: unjustified overurbanization and very disorganized, extremely energy-intensive and ecosystemically destructive urban layouts that are completely at odds with the public interests of environmental and urban quality. In the following paper, we make some comparisons with other European countries and outline some possible directions—certainly very difficult to follow—to rethink and remedy these negative effects.

The main tool for biodiversity conservation at the European level is the Natura 2000 network. The identification of Natura 2000 as an “ecological network spread over the entire European Union territory” is the symbolic image launched by the Habitat Directive (92/43/EEC) even though many considerations focused on the contradiction between the shared model of the ecological network—based on spatial continuity—and the fragmented geographical configuration of the Natura 2000 sites. Currently, it stretches across all 28 European countries, both on land and at sea, and it is made up of over 27,000 sites for a total extension of approximately 1,150,000 km2. The land area covered by N2000 corresponds to approximately 18% of the total EU, with the national coverage ratio ranging from a minimum of 9% to a maximum of 38% in the various European countries. The aim of this study was to determine the degree of landscape fragmentation caused by the urban areas towards the Natura 2000 network, with the aim of analyzing how the current urban settlements’ geography could compromise their functionality. The proximity analysis carried out provides the necessary information to achieve full efficiency in the connections between the different habitats. In addition, these results give indications on which planning scale is most appropriate to intervene to reduce environmental fragmentation.

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 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.