Sustainable urban regeneration: designing and planning for unpredictability

The disciplinary debate of urban planner scientific community focus today on urban regeneration, stimulated by the pursuit of multiple objectives: ecological sustainability, social inclusiveness and resilience are probably the ones that most arouse the interest of urban planners. However, we register a prolificacy of meanings for urban regeneration that is often confused with building maintenance and adaptation. This is not necessarily wrong but, in a period of public budget restriction, the simply not focusing on primary objectives often hinders the much more necessary processes of intimate transformation of urban fabric and of functions which are central in urban regeneration. Nevertheless, in the last twenty years, the Italian legislator has exploited this ambiguity and preferred to concentrate the available resources on interventions on a building scale rather than properly on an urban scale. There are many reasons underlying this choice. Certainly, the distrust in the urban planning procedures, which are considered too long, uncertain and do not give immediate electoral consensus, seems to be the main. From this evidence emerges the reflection on the need to rethink the legislative framework of urban planning as an indispensable condition for the start of a season of real regeneration of urban settlements.