Healthy cities and urban planning: The QLandQLife model as input for experimentation

Abstract

Based on input provided by the QLandQLife research, this contribution reflects on the potential of the content and devices contained in Law no. 10/2013, with particular reference to the national urban green plan. The questions asked by the research and its results highlight the importance of working with the open space of the contemporary city to improve environmental comfort and well-being in urban areas. Broadly speaking, these themes seek a renewed relationship between urban planning and health in which urban open/green space is only one of the structural elements addressed to promote better lifestyles and widespread well-being. In this view, the potential of the national urban green plan is seen not just as an additional tool for the sector but as an opportunity to reconsider urban green and open space as a possible incubator of new principles, functions, and activities. Reinterpreting some content and objectives expressed legislatively as matters of design inherent in ordinary planning tools seems indispensable. First of all, this means reconsidering the role of urban green areas as a necessary performance standard capable of overcoming the quantitative standard that arose at the end of the 1960s. This new interpretational key is capable of anchoring the principles of experimentation in the QLandQLife model with an existing and still-developing disciplinary debate regarding urban health and well-being. It favours the role that urban green areas can play in renewing consolidated approaches and paths in the city’s governance tools according to a perspective that favours a healthy city and a reciprocal interest in health and urban planning.