Speaker
Description
Reflections about the overcomed Covid-19 pandemic fed the debate about the quality and sustainability of our lifestyle in urban contexts, that extent multiple theories, before which the 15-minute city (Emery & Thrift, 2021; Manzini, 2021), have received such resonance that several institutional figures have proposed them for their election campaigns. In contrast to this panorama, the pandemic has led to a reevaluation of living in the countryside, but also to the definition of new and different ways of addressing the issue of proximity in extremely fragile territories, characterized by an increasing depopulation, with a 38% of the EU population living in settlements from 5,000 to 100,000 inhabitants (EU Commission, 2011), by a dramatic restriction of welfare and public services, lack of innovation and economic competitiveness, and from precarious, fragmented and poorly representative forms of governance.
Within this panorama, a fundamental step leading to a rebirth and repopulation of these territories passes from new social, economic and cultural dynamics (Teti 2019, 2022; Manzini 2021) that could bring to new networkings of these peripheral realities in broader contexts, where proximity becomes an area and represents a challenge intimately linked to the system of territorial mobility.
Peripherality means long distances from poles of essential services as well as long commuting distances to work, a high dependence on individual car use, an increase of gas emissions and traffic jams towards bigger urban cores. So, while coordination of transports and urban planning is one of the prerequisite for achieving sustainable urban development in bigger cities, there is still an evident wide gap between the theoretical elaboration and practical application of transit-oriented policies in fragile territories, integrated with the urban planning, due to institutional fragmentation between sectors and between different governance scales.
Keeping in view all these issues, virtuous examples can be found in the new institutional mechanism recently proposed by local authorities in France called the Contrat d'Axe (Corridor Contract), a planning tool negotiated between the public transport and urban planning stakeholders for a localised public transport project where the parties commit to improve the transport service and the urban structure around the transport itself and multimodal access to stations (Ravagnan and Amato, 2020), as well as in Italy with the similar experiment of River Contracts, as agreements between "entities with responsibility for water management and use, land planning and environmental protection" (National Charter of River Contracts, 2012). So, contracts as instruments aimed at overcoming the separation of sectoral competences at the decision-making level: a pragmatic, flexible instrument which would not be too rigid in order to bring different actors into dialogue on a specific local case (Maulat, 2015).
This contribution examines the methodological contamination and intentions between different forms of area planning influenced by soft governance dynamics (Salvagnin, 2020) to identify the potential linked to an axis (whether it is the river, a railway axis, road mobility, cycle-pedestrian or public transport route, an ecological corridor) as narrative, metaphorical and real basis of a negotiated programming tool that includes multiple actors with the aim to realize or enhance the existing, shape inclusive, resilient mobility systems and finally reach shared urban design strategies and projects, as well as a formal commitment to make them operational through the partnership of a plurality of subjects.
References
Emery T., Thrift J. (2021), 20-Minute Neighbourhoods – Creating Healthier, Active, Prosperous Communities. An Introduction for Council Planners in England, TCPA. [Online] Available at: https://tcpa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/final_20mnguide-compressed.pdf
European Commission (2011), Cities of tomorrow: Challenges, visions, ways forward. Publications Office of the European Union. [Online] Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/studies/citiesoftomorrow/citiesoftomorrow_final.pdf
Manzini, E. (2021) Abitare la prossimità. Milano: Egea Editore.
Maulat, J. (2015), Contractualiser pour coordonner urbanisme et transport ? Regards croisés sur quatre expériences de contrats d’axes ferroviaires. Flux, N° 101-102(3), 82-98. [Online] Available at: https://shs.cairn.info/revue-flux-2015-3-page-82?lang=fr
Ravagnan, C.; Amato, C. (2020) Percorsi di resilienza. Rilancio e riuso delle ferrovie in dismissione nei territori fragili tra Italia e Spagna. Roma: Aracne Editrice.
Salvagnin, A. (2020) La soft governance comunitaria: La Strategia europea per lo sviluppo sostenibile. Venezia: Università Ca' Foscari. [Online] Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10579/17408
Teti, Vito (2022) La Restanza. Torino: Einaudi Editore.
Teti, V. (2019) Riabitare i paesi. Un “manifesto” per i borghi in abbandono e in via di spopolamento. Dialoghi Mediterranei, 35.
| Keywords | peripheral territories, sustainable revitalization; mobility planning; soft-governance tools; bottom-up involvement |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
