Design and Urban Shape for a Resilient City

Abstract

Today the themes related to urban design are lacking of appropriate legislation references in Italian urbanism, falling in between the strictly urban issues related to the city and those concerning individual building objects.Public and private operators seek to address -and solve- the key topic of the impossibility, via ordinary tools, of developing significant parts of the city, relying on the minimum requirement in terms of standards and public areas to be sold to citizen community, given the limited economic resources available for the public Administrations. Through instruments such as Masterplan, they offer the opportunity to design new urban territories with the introduction of high -quality solutions in terms of connections between empty spaces and constructions, life quality and environmental sustainability. (Giberti, 2008). The growing complexity of the urban landscape of the Italian cities, more and more influenced by exogenous reasons (events, natural disasters, financial programs..), confirmed the dual role that the Urban Planning Project can acquire, taking into account the Project typical local resources and at the same time providing the Plan guarantees of transformation, offering a more efficient and effective response than ordinary actions. The alternatives ran in the case of the city of L’Aquila, include on one hand the application of the slogan “where it was, as it was”, through the accurate reconstruction of individual building, not considering the urban problems already present, and on the other hand, the Urban Regeneration Plans introduction, without any temporal certainty. The LAURAq and Laboratory AnTeAtoday experimentations are actually concentrated on the Urban Planning Project and resilience theme, particularly on the role of the network of public spaces in natural disasters. The “street” has a key role, since it is the main element of the public space in L’Aquila city, that even before the 2009 earthquake had evidents urban problems and that, post-disaster, was reorganized along a single main road, the National Road n. 17 (SS17), which moved from crossing roadtook to both distribution road and urban street.(http://www.laboratoriourbanisticoaquila.eu/index.html).