The essay critically addresses several solutions and strategies for tackling urban inequalities to uphold the recent "right to the 'healthy' city" spatial paradigm based on early social science works by Emily Skinner and Jeffrey R. and then developed as a urban planning component by the interdisciplinary research group Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (2019). The authors propose a transdisciplinary approach in dealing with city renewal-regeneration and the safer use of its spaces. The interrelation between urbanism and architecture, including environmental design, mobility, and social relations, among others, would merge to imagine a more ecologically and socially balanced urban milieu. The paper analyses four specific case studies assumed as proper approaches in dealing with the pandemic, critically reflecting on the application of "Superblocks," "Tactical Urbanism," and "15-minute City" concepts by illustrating and comparing their application in three global cities (respectively Barcelona, Beijing, and Milan). In a nutshell, the authors demonstrate that these policies have their crucial feature in being effective applications formulated for different contexts, proposing successful strategies to overcome health, environment, and mobility issues in all the contemporary global cities.

In 2010, the municipality of Shanghai started the "Huangpu River Comprehensive Development Plan", a large regeneration initiative including the Expo site, targeted to revitalize the river banks and generally the urban environment, making Xuhui waterfront one of the six key construction areas of the 12th Five-Year Plan in Shanghai. Formerly one of the largest industrial districts, the so-called West Bund area has experienced a process of substantial transformation, currently still ongoing. Particular attention has been paid to the rehabilitation of the riverside, as a source of landscape enhancement, providing a system of open spaces and public facilities able to meet the dweller's demands and to attract touristic fluxes. For this reason, the West Bund Project represents one of the most relevant regeneration initiative currently taking place in Shanghai. This paper aims to investigate, starting from this specific case-study, the role of water in the definition of cultural and natural elements, revealing new perspectives for the revitalization of the urban environment.

This chapter analyses three strategies proposed to redefine current urban policies to deal with issues inherited from the contemporary city evolution. The case study analysis focuses on applying the concepts of 15-min City, Tactical Urbanism, and Superblock in global cities such as Barcelona, Shanghai, and Milan. Have these cities changed the urban environment and mobility patterns dealing with health, social, and economic inequities? Which have been the impacts of urban regeneration, governance, and inclusion towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 11, emphasizing the need for inclusivity and equitability in urban areas? These questions find the answer in three main aspects. First, the regeneration of the existing built environment; second, short-, medium-, and long-term governance issues; third, the concerns about the possible risk of gentrification. An introductive part explains the adopted methodology, follows an analysis of the three case studies, and, eventually, remarks on what we learned. Two are the primary outcomes: a comparison between different global cities and diverse ways to deal with the impacts of people-centered solutions for urban environments and an evaluation of 15-min City, Tactical Urbanism, and Superblocks feasible solutions for sustainable urban transition.

With the turn of the millennium, Chinese central government issued arrays of policies targeted to promote virtuous cycles of vitalization in rural areas, mitigate the socio-economic gap with urbanised regions, and face the problem of food security. The current transition is leading China to have an ever-saturated land where the boundaries between human settlements are elusive and blurred, shaping what is scholarly labelled as an urban-rural continuum. The settlement's schemes realized over the last years, that consists of small or medium size towns as the result of natural villages relocation or new agglomerations, intercepts the call for urbanity, and its related amenities in terms of infrastructure and services -or, in aword, the desire for ahouse in the city -emerging from the marginalized rural citizens. The authors found that such controversial practices are shaping the new Chinese countryside which, conceived as aform of sustainable development by national programs, turned out to impact significantly on the people lifestyle as well as the built environment. Based on several months on-field observations and recent literature, the paper reveals atwo-fold degree of resilience: weak about the real production of space for dwelling and robust about the intangible culture composed by indigenous beliefs and symbolism entangled with the concepts of home and family

Smallsettlementsincountrysideareascallforagrowingnumberofchallengesagainst the backdrop of global rural-urban transition. In this paper, we focus on the processes of depopulation and building abandonment in rural areas of China and Italy. We consider two similar experiences taking place in different contexts, and suggest useful design tools for strategies of architectural requalification. In China, we study a small village in Fujian Province as a paradigmatic example of the well-known phenomenon of “hollow villages.” The word hollow refers to the emptying of dwellings in the central parts of rural settlements, while, paradoxically, their fringe areas are the object of residential land expansion. This notion was coined in the early 1990s to describe the spatial, social and economic consequences of the combination of a rural exodus and a rampant urbanisation. In Italy, we consider a case study in the Province of Trento, where the evacuation of village central cores follow the sprawling towards the village’s outskirts. Even though the recent trends show that the demographic haemorrhage away from the village is declining, the abandonment of old houses in favour of the construction of new ones seems relentless. Such issues gather a growing interest by cultural, political and academic institutions. Never the less, little attention has been paid to the similarities of architectural experiences across national boundaries. Aiming to bridge this gap, we compare the results of our studies on the architectural requalification of rural settlements in both China and Italy. Our methodology embodies a graphic representation of our fieldwork, examines the relationships between the built form and its natural framework and analytically assesses the physical condition and use level of the existing buildings. Despite local specificities, there are significant overlaps from which these and other cases can gain insight. We observe that similar transnational issues can be stimulated by global transition processes driven by local forces and context-related patterns of spatial transformation. More specifically, the intensity and the extent of hollowing of Chinese villages stimulates the broad testing of a spectrum of methodologies and knowledges. These can be both inherited from other contexts or experimented with as innovative approaches. From this perspective, the Italian experience, where the abandonment dates backwards in time, is a fruitful source of comparison.