Changes in Vision - Urban Landscapes: Environmental Networks and Quality of Life - page 52

Regeneration interventions will allow a rethinking of the network of cen-
trality and places of reference, with particular regard for the new extraordinary
role of the urban fringe . Particular attention is placed on the microscale , the
care for public spaces, and social and economic fragility. Plans and programs
will rely on design indications and types, as well as norms and parameters, to
guarantee the best use of natural resources , mitigate climate variations that
are under way, and prevent environmental risks. In particular, the objectives
will be reached through:

• Adequate ways to arrange external spaces, foreseeing appropriate indices

of land permeability.

• Innovative building types able to improve energetic efficiency and the use

of design parameters that consider solar radiation incident on the building.

• A certification system that is univocal and credible on the national level,

and which can be applied to all existing buildings.

Urban regeneration is therefore also ecological regeneration and techno-
logical innovation. Very often, however, as Federica Ottone reminds us in
Chapter 8.5.6 of this volume, the urgency of intervening is discouraged by the
incapacity to begin reflecting on the economic implications that an eventual
technological and architectural reconfiguration of the public and private build-
ing heritage carries, and its real benefits for the community.
This assumption of responsibility implies that concrete cases for experi-
mentation should be identified to effectively establish the point at which the
advantages of an energetic requalification action can be sustained by collec-
tive and public administrations, and eventually what interventions are the most
sustainable. When faced with complex problems related to climatic changes,
we should fight the temptation to oscillate between the rhetoric on greenhouse
gases risks and the freeing capacity of bio-architecture. Between these two
extremes there is intelligent organization in ecologically effective shapes of
the existing city; there is a close interaction between strategies for the city's
economic development and the natural and historical/cultural permanence that
our dense, stratified European territories are so rich in. In the case study of the
Adriatic city, which is discussed in the last chapter, it is revealed how in areas
of settlement diffusion there is a serious need to be able to adopt complex
regeneration policies capable of harmonizing settlement structures that are
growing in a casual way without the adequate involvement of public spaces
and green areas and without evaluating, preventatively, the increase in energy
consumption and the unsatisfactory level of territorial performance that is
thereby derived.