Speaker
Description
The critical role of cities in addressing the global climate crisis is increasingly acknowledged. The European Union (EU), one of the most urbanized regions globally, has placed urban issues at the core of its political agenda, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as evidenced by numerous measures aimed at fostering sustainable development, such as the Leipzig charter (2007), The Urbana Agenda for the EU (2016) or the European Green Deal (2020). These international initiatives consistently identify mobility as a central issue for sustainable development, emphasizing both improved accessibility and reduced environmental impact. Confirming this awareness, the EU introduced a new strategic plan in 2009 at an inter-municipal scale, the Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) (COM 2009/490). This planning device, designed for a medium- to long-term implementation, aims to achieve social-economic and environmental sustainability objectives, highlighting the role of mobility in the context of the existing city as a tool to counter marginality.
This research examines urban regeneration by focusing on the strategic role of sustainable mobility within the consolidated city, defined as the urbanized territory shaped by 20th-century planning, characterized by a compact urban structure and limited public spaces and services (Garano, 2001). The significance of this portion of urbanized territory is underlined by its size, and the enormous building and housing density that characterizes it. In Italy, these strategic areas emerged during the rapid post-war growth period until the early 1980s, and now face challenges due to their original car-dependent development model. This issue is further exacerbated by the unique “genetic anomaly” of Italian cities, where industrial growth was not matched by the development of extensive rail networks (Campos Venuti, 2001).
The aim of this paper is to identify theoretical, methodological, and operational references for an innovative planning system which, through the implementation of public transport networks, can trigger regeneration processes within the consolidated city. A case study of Rome explores the interplay between the pilot project “15 Projects for the 15-Minute City,” inspired by Carlos Moreno’s model that prioritizes service accessibility and proximity (Moreno, 2024), and the mobility forecasts of the new metropolitan SUMP (approved December 2024). The latter renews and extends the ambitions of the current city's regulatory planning (NPRG, 2008), seeking to enhance mass public transport offer through a ‘rail therapy’ identified as ‘the condition’ for implementing the city’s development strategies, based on a polycentric model (Marcelloni, 2003; Ricci, 2009).
The methodology is structured in three phases:
1. Contextualization: A diachronic analysis of the formation processes of the consolidated city in relation to mobility infrastructure development, alongside a review of the regulatory framework.
2. Case Study Analysis: An examination of Rome’s mobility plans and urban regeneration projects to inductively identify innovative strategies, tools, and guidelines for transforming the consolidated city, including synergies with other planning devices and resource transposition strategies.
3. Systematization: The development of a flexible framework that organizes the identified strategies into coherent modalities for governing sustainable mobility interventions.
The proposed framework aim to integrate planning instruments at different scales, within a strategic/structural planning system that envisions potential implementations with coherence-based guidelines and structural invariants of planning at different scales serving as a coherence framework for transformations in the existing city, capable of enabling access to different funding channels (Galuzzi and Vitillo, 2018).
Ultimately, the research underscores the central role of sustainable mobility in regenerating the consolidated city, arguing that mobility planning must form the backbone, within the broader conception of the Public City as a reference matrix for urban sustainability, of transformative processes aimed at rebalancing spatial inequalities (Oliva and Ricci, 2017).
References
Campos Venuti, G. (2001) ‘Il Sistema della mobilità’, Urbanistica, 116, pp. 166–172.
Galuzzi, P. and Vitillo, P. (2018) ‘Città contemporanea e rigenerazione urbana. Temi, azioni, strumenti’, Equilibri, (1), pp. 125–133.
Garano, S. (2001) ‘La Città Consolidata’, Urbanistica, 116, pp. 124–130.
Marcelloni, M. (2003) Pensare la città contemporanea. Il nuovo piano regolatore di Roma. Bari: Laterza.
Moreno, C. (2024) La città dei 15 minuti: per una cultura urbana democratica. Translated by C. Licata. Torino: Add.
Oliva, F. and Ricci, L. (2017) ‘Promoting urban regeneration and the requalification of built housing stock’, in E. Antonini and F. Tucci (eds) Architecture, city and territory towards a green economy : building a manifesto of the green economy for the architecture and the city of the future. Milano: Edizioni Ambiente, pp. 204–219.
Ricci, L. (2009) Piano locale e ...: nuove regole, nuovi strumenti, nuovi meccanismi attuativi. Milano: F. Angeli.
| Keywords | Consolidated city; Sustainable mobility; Urban Regeneration; Urban Planning; 15-minute city |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
