No abstract

Always in history, the shaping of new landscapes is accompanied by important economic and social changes, and the relative outcomes had great impact on the formation of a new system of relations between investment choices and planning choices, orienting the management of different options of landscapes transformations. Undoubtedly, the innovation and technology incentives have anticipated the realization of solutions with a better executive convenience and better economic results. Today, the transformations seems interested by frequently contradictory choices and by short respite solutions, because these are influenced by affairs extraneous to the regional territory characteristics. Nevertheless, there are a lot of experiences that show a farsighted environmental and landscape planning. The paper underlines the characters of the transformations, putting into evidence the hybridization factors of consolidated landscapes, the most technologized architectures, the adaptability of traditional building to energetic saving, the difficulties of adaptation to energy saving policies in construction, and the scenarios that foreshadow different spaces and times for the same context transformations. We are in an "energy transition" in which scenarios of new landscapes prevail hybrid fragmentation due to provisions by sectors and territorial contexts.

The paper asserts that each new urban and land planning approach, (ranging from the environment assessment procedures and land suitability analysis introduced in the past, to the newer methods of resilience and urban metabolism) should be considered as useful support tools for the territorial government, but none of them in itself is sufficient to overcome the main issues that had a negative influence on the effectiveness of planning, and that contributed to the disrepute of the comprehensive planning tools. To safeguard the environmental resources it is necessary to assure a programmatic continuity of the political choices at different levels, both public and institutional, and of the private-public relations, nowadays overbalanced because of the generalized use of urban equal distribution construction rights and because of planning agreements on varying comprehensive plan, often without any justifiable reasons. To disentangle through the networks that connects the construction sector's interests and the expectations of urban and financial performances, it is necessary to develop new approaches and comprehensive planning tools able to involve townspeople and to share the aims of the comprehensive planning it self. It is necessary to acknowledge the ineluctability of bonds and precepts that seems to be forgotten in the present time, like owning public properties and public areas to be destined to urban services and ecological areas with regenerative qualities. Hypotheses, and a brief historical digressionRegardless of the different approaches to urban and land planning, we must first address the question of the defining characters of urban and land planning, both on the conceptual and instrumental plan. As we shall see, a first distinction between urban and land planning concerns the denominations most widely used in the field-an ambivalence often covering competence overlaps and shifts between different specific fields.Nevertheless, the concepts and tools of both fields function within a practical framework, where the elements subject to intervention exist independently of how administrators, researchers and technicians perceive them. These natural and man-made elements cannot be univocally understood, as they are placed in a space-time continuum, where each exists specifically (and, to an extent, autonomously) in a separate region of space. 1Land and Urban Planning are thus the two sides of a reasoned local and city governance, and there can be no unqualified separation between them, but distinctions must be made between each discipline's specific planning tools: for instance, district-level strategies applying the urban-metabolism approach are very different from local plans involving the participation of both house-owners and non-owners.Each choice must be based on a comprehensive knowledge base, identifying the constraints of natural elements, and outlining the network of relevant interests; each choice must be implemented through a shared policy functioning on different levels and in different fie...