The health and economic crisis triggered by the pandemic has highlighted the urgency of creating development models able to generate more widespread, sustainable wellbeing, involving both the territory, one of Italy’s chief assets, and the renewal processes of cities and infrastructure. This is the backdrop for urban regeneration, which means transforming cities and districts (nothing more or less than a specific form of public infrastructure) and encouraging their redesign to embrace change and long-term forecasts about the ways cities are used.
Today, cities and territories are required to adapt to the changes affecting them as never before. Urban regeneration will be an opportunity and a key factor in the national agenda, as well as a strategic choice that allows them to attract, thanks to the efficient use of the existing building stock and the improvement of the quality of urban environments. Cities will also have to tackle problems of functional decline and deterioration without consuming new land, and reducing concrete use.
The Italian National Recovery Plan focuses particularly strongly on urban regeneration as the tool for supporting the social inclusion of young people, and of combating social and environmental deterioration, through investment in the requalification of heritage sites, suburbs and historic parks and gardens, and support for joint projects for culture-based urban regeneration, centred on local communities.
