Transformation and maintenance of the existing as ecological chance to build sustainable scenarios

Abstract

The recent Manifesto of Assisi: a human scale economy against the climate crisis, the Encyclical Laudato Be for the Care of the Common Home of 2015, and the 17 objectives of the United Nations Charter 2020–2030 about material and social sustainability, represent essential stages of the path started in 1972 with The Limits to Growth of the Club of Rome and, then, of the UN Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro of 1992, crucial steps to go beyond the “industrialist” paradigm in place for over 350 whose social and environmental limits are increasingly evident and of which global warming is one of the most serious signs. A great opportunity to maintain or transform, with care and attention, the historical, social, urban and architectural values of territories and cities, i.e. the morphology, infrastructures, building typologies, the landscape, result of the relationship between human activities and nature as mentioned in the European Landscape Convention of 2000. The threat is that all this depends on criteria that are indifferent to the local context and the well-being of the inhabitants and governed by powers and economic choices only, plus having an increase in various types of risks. It will be highlighted how the territorial and urban policies used, using an integrated ecological approach, can produce different development scenarios that are environmentally and socially sustainable. Starting from the safety of the territory, from greenery and, last but not least, water, both as resource and as risk, today essential elements of life quality and urban space.