Mapping maintenance regulations: a methodological framework to improve territorial resilience

Nowadays, in the entire world, we can clearly see the effects of climate changes. Indeed, during the last twenty years, climate-related and geophysical disasters killed around 1.3 million people and left a further 4.4 billion injured, homeless, displaced or in need of emergency assistance. From this framework, it is clear that we need policies to improve the resilience of our cities. Those ones are only some components of a more complex system that includes also natural elements, i.e. the territory. Therefore, in order to improve the resilience of the cities we must work on it at first, looking for those practices able to maintain it in an efficiency state and consequently ready to react upon the occurrence of natural events. It is for this reason that in the research here summarized we decided to focus on the existing regulations wondering in which ways they could be useful to achieve our purpose. Knowing that between 1998 and 2017 floods were about 43.4% of all the disasters, we decided to focus on the hydraulic risk with explicit reference to the Italian case. Through a methodological analysis of the national, regional and municipal regulations, it was possible to structure a detailed state of art in terms of tasks and responsibilities, clarifying, in particular, the hierarchy of public or private bodies. The outline drawn up highlights links, overlapping regulations and open areas, which are considered relevant to be regulated and improved. In the end, a useful tool for the coordination of the institutions in the operations of ordinary and extraordinary maintenance is proposed.