No abstract

There is now a clear disparity between major cities and villages located in marginal areas of Italy. Progressive depopulation of inland areas and urban polarization such as consolidated territorial dynamics are difficult to dampen and adapt to the new paradigms of sustainable territorial development, although they have been abruptly redirected by the Covid 19 pandemic. The instability created by this pandemic offers the opportunity to redefine new parameters of intervention and new scenarios for the development of territories in relation to the new needs of decentralization and physical distancing. The project “Renaissance of villages for the revitalization of marginal areas” aims to create the conditions to repopulate and rebalance shrinking territories by establishing new centers of attractiveness. This project envisages the active involvement of municipalities and local authorities with the aims at implementing the multi-sectoral analysis of the tangible and intangible values of territories. It intends to develop an interactive web dashboard to be provided to municipalities in order to create both a learning environment and a spatial decision support system for future local policy actions towards a sustainable participatory local development. In this way, it is proposed a functional method with a place-based approach to managing the existing territorial complexity through innovative models of territorial governance and policymaking, among them the effective implementation of participatory and multi-actor visions of territorial development. Specifically, this paper provides the Italian villages’ archetypes through the quantitative spatial cluster multivariate analysis, which is the basis for the construction of the dashboard. To cluster the villages, the main variables have been identified, assesses, and mapped. The results are fundamental in order to define the future scenarios for each archetype assessing the Key Performance indicators (KPIs).

The transition towards sustainable cities requires extensive improvement of environmental and energy consumption performances. However, the design of alternative sustainable scenarios is a complex issue which involves a large number of indicators and multiple stakeholders. In this regard, the use of appropriate assessment tools and decision-making models for addressing this issue are needed. This study aims at presenting research activities with a specific focus on the definition of policies and decision-making models to guide future transformations in the city, developing a “sustainable path”. The result is a new multi-criteria indicators-based system for supporting decision making at the city level. This includes the organization of a workshop in order to select the relevant indicators and to assign the stakeholders’ preferences using a multi-criteria method. This approach is used in order to investigate the stakeholders’ perspectives on the impact of each indicator on the different future sustainable scenarios. Eight indicators have been selected, and accordingly, assessed through the collection of data for the “baseline” scenario. Next step will involve the definition of different forward-looking sustainable scenarios and the assessment of their impacts through the selected indicators. Finally, all the scenarios will be verified through a second interactive workshop as part of the sustainable urban planning process to choose the best scenario.

In Italy, there is a clear disparity between cities and villages located in marginal areas. The progressive depopulation of inland areas and the urban polarization represent consolidated dynamics difficult to adapt to the new paradigm of sustainable development. The post-Covid-19 pandemic scenario offers the opportunity to redefine new parameters of intervention and new visions for the regeneration of villages in accord with the new challenges of decentralization and distancing. The project «Renaissance of villages for the revitalization of marginal areas» (2021) aims to create the conditions to repopulate and rebalance shrinking territories by establishing new centres of attractiveness. This project envisages the active involvement of municipalities to implement multi-sectoral analysis and spatial assessment approaches in planning processes. It intends to develop an interactive web dashboard for local authorities and spatial planners to create both a learning environment and a participative spatial decision support system for future local policy actions toward sustainable local development. This study presents the project’s preliminary phase which aims to create the general framework of the web dashboard. A reconstruction of the village definition and the spatial selection of villages throughout Italy are presented as innovative aspects since the absence of an agreed definition of the village in the national and international level documents. Moreover, this study provides a quantitative spatial multivariate analysis cluster that analyzes, and groups Italian territories based on socioeconomic dynamics. The result of this analysis allows us to divide the territory into archetypes and to structure a framework that supports the definition of future scenarios for the regeneration of small urban areas considering the diversified needs and potential of the villages belonging to specific archetypes analyzed in the study.

No abstract