L'eredità dello sprawl. Risorse territoriali e sviluppo urbano sostenibile: un problema multiscalare

Many times, in the last years, various attempts have been made to deal with the outcomes of the global economic crisis by means of possible relaunch policies for the construction industry; almost always following a neo-classical growth model, mostly grounded on a quantitative interpretation of development and primarily aimed to raise again the consumption variable, constantly seen as the main index of social well-being. But is it still advisable today – we could ask - to follow such a tendency? Especially in the present circumstances, when multiple signals coming from the economy, the social and the environmental sciences, as well as from the urban and territorial studies, are revealing some ongoing radical transformations, showing all the limits of traditional growth policies. The “weak” sustainability paradigm - appeared in the last decades of the XXth Century and based on a possible balance between the loss of natural resources and the increase of fixed capitals - is now meant to be replaced by a “strong” interpretation of it, more radical and grounded on a non-negotiability principle of the common finite resources; additionally some of the more recent studies, about the relationships among economic policies, social progress and territorial development, are recommending explicitly a necessary substitution of the only economic evaluations (such as the GDP-based ones) with more complex indicators, coming also from the ecology field, such as land take, landscape fragmentation, level of biodiversity etc. Moreover the physical changes recently observed in the European territory seem to confirm – from a general point of view – a significant slowdown of the sprawl processes in many regions and a collateral increase of transformations in already urbanized areas. Our cities and countryside are rapidly evolving in new metropolitan-like systems, very different from the traditional ones, but anyway able to extend the urban characters to wide parts of the territory, where opposite functional logics, social needs and morphological structures coexist at different scales, continuously variable and mutually intertwined. Reasoning about a sustainable future for cities and regions in terms of “open scales” means, therefore, mainly to break their individual boundaries of autonomy (political, economic, technical, administrative etc.) to reassemble all of these matters in large, holistic recomposing figures; it means most of all to assign to the project a role quite different from the traditional one – (a superimposed device, aimed to produce univocal solutions to specific questions) – and to place it among the stakeholders and decision makers as a dialog catalyser, taking advantage of its prefiguration capabilities.