Environmental heritage and urban redevelopment

Through a series of workshops, the municipalities were involved and trained for building a shared Functional Urban Area identity, evaluating their Ecosystem Services, managing their land use conflicts and involving citizens in all spatial decision-making processes. This cooperation brought, in each participating country, to the construction of an Action Plan for the definition of the Integrated Environmental Management Strategies for the Functional Urban Areas.

While there is a large body of literature focusing on the theoretical definitions and measures of accessibility, the extent to which such measures are applied into practice to assess project alternatives is less frequent. To increase usability of accessibility instruments, visualization tools are commonly recognized as the most effective methodology, particularly in those processes involving public stakeholders and non-experts. This paper presents an accessibility Interactive Visualization Tool, named InViTo (Pensa et al., 2013), and its application to an empirical study (i.e. Rome) aiming at exploring the potential usability of the tool in engaging public stakeholders into the assessment of different urban development options (e.g. modifying land-uses, new infrastructures, etc.). InViTo is a platform, based on free and open technologies such as Google Maps and Google Fusion Tables, showing real-time outcomes of accessibility levels for the cells (i.e. zones, areas, blocks, …) of an...

Five years after the earthquake in Abruzzo in 2009 it is possible to draw up a first balance sheet of the public actions carried out so far in relation to reconstruction. The transformations undergone by L’Aquila and the territory of Abruzzo impose a re-reading of the institutional framework and of the role that the Plan can have in addressing the conflicts deriving from the physical and social reconstruction of the regional capital. But the joint presence of many and various litigious actors makes it complex to adopt a new season of projects able to make the most of the substantial public financing and to direct this towards agreed models of urban development. Moreover a comparison with the effectiveness of public actions that may be observed in analogous cases in the urban history of L’Aquila makes the picture even more alarming.