Risk Economy: the effectiveness of urban supportive policies for the safety and resilience in town centres

According to the theories of Campos Venuti in the 1980s urban planning went from a mainly expansive approach to a new one centered on transformation processes. The 1990s and the first decade of the new century saw the disintegration of disciplinary boundaries with the pairing of urban policies with social, fiscal, environmental and finally ecological ones. Today, with such themes we pair emergency ones that require immediate responses, in as far as they are intimately connected to the safety and quality of urban life. The very recent seismic events in central Italy demonstrate the need to directly involve the built heritage in a securing process. The scarcity of resources and the need to govern such practices in a coordinated way that is also respectful of the values at hand gives the matter a urban planning dimension above all. This article is an account of a research on the subject that was conducted at the Federico II University in Naples. The thesis is that solutions to the unsafety of built environment is to be found in public-private partnerships, in a collaborative approach based on urban policies and concrete incentives.