Re-urbanising the Contemporary City: Spatial Planning and Green Strategy in Turin

Among the different configurations that public and private space takes on in the city, green space is undoubtedly the component where the improvement of the health and wellbeing of urban communities and the quality of settlements, as well as social inclusion and the mitigation of the impacts produced by climate change, are most at stake. The environmental, social, economic and technological challenges the contemporary city faces require the revision of traditional models of modern urbanism. That is, they call for a rethinking, above all, of the more recent spatial models that have mostly focused on the punctual government of transformations and reconversions of urban brownfields, without however succeeding either in limiting the persistent intensity of widespread urbanisation processes or in grafting broader effects of urban regeneration (in its multiple components: environmental, social, housing and employment). Through the case study of the City of Turin, this paper tackles the theme of green infrastructures as a frame of a broader and anthropocentric ecological-environmental reorganisation of the contemporary city. In this perspective, the urban scale opens up new ways of working through the use of design devices capable of becoming a structuring part of the urban spatial project, contributing to directing choices towards objectives of complex regeneration (ecological-environmental, social and economic) of the city aimed at an optimal use of resources.