Environmental Networks for Smart Territories - Urban Landscapes: Environmental Networks and Quality of Life - page 80

tive seems to be an effective course of action for forming smart communities,
insofar as biodiversity becomes an occasion to reach broader social objectives.
The case study of the Marche REM, which is refined in the territory through
contributions by different stakeholders, presupposes activating participation and
communication processes that become important tools for its implementation.
Tools for creating the network should, in fact, coincide with a rich characteriza-
tion and articulation of those acting in its transformation. The sharing of network
objectives, strategies, and measurements certainly cannot start after the planning
of the REM, but is activated even from the cognitive phase. The community
should contribute to interpreting the elements of crisis in the city and to “ translate
individual worries into public questions ” [31]. Thus, the evaluation of the current
planning and programming system is already a first step in contacting all of the
stakeholders that should contribute to its implementation, as well as disseminating
general objectives and specifying the real territorial effects of the REM.
The interest of the community in the network is deep, insofar as it is linked
to attention for quality of life and insofar as it passes through the combination
of aesthetics and ecology . For so long, a city has been imagined in which the
aspiration for beauty was another thing entirely with respect to aspirations for
the city's ecological dimension . The challenge that intelligent communities
are already facing is, instead, oriented precisely at bringing together these two
extraordinary dimensions. In fact, the community perceives that beauty does
not derive only from aesthetic artifice , but also from the same need faced in
project choices. It is precisely ecology, together with other territorial, econom-
ic, and social sciences , that argues for “the need.”
The REM is therefore a basic environmental infrastructure that involves the
community directly and which, placed above commonly frequented infrastruc-
tures (such as transportation or energy), tends to ensure conditions for a qual-
ity future throughout the territory, not only in terms of well-being for the
inhabitants and in response to the expectations and imagination of the “ inter-
ested populations ,” but also in terms of new aesthetic interpretations dictated
by new ecological and symbolic horizons.
In the Adriatic city case study, which we discuss in the next chapter, the
REM becomes the first project, limited to the Marche territory, shared by the
local community and carried to completion. The REM has had this priority as
long as the general objective has been to maintain the environmental infra-
structure as the principal structure of the Adriatic city, with which particular
project and governance decisions are engaged. The environmental network
becomes the spatial anchor of the overall systematic vision, which is flexible
and fluid, and which we address in the next chapter.

References

1. Benedict MA, McMahon ET (2006) Green Infrastructure, Linking Landscapes and Commu-

nities. The Conservation Found. Island Press, Washington D.C.