The contemporary cities are facing affected by three factors that are changing our lifestyle: the economic and relative social crisis getting worse by the pandemic, the technological revolution and the climate changes effects. In this framework, this thesis investigates the adaptive urban planning as a part of DICAM - Trento Urban Transformation Research Programme, which started in 2017 to provide scientific support for the Trento general urban plan review. This doctoral research aims to demonstrate how the open, adaptive and metabolic plan can respond to city demands by means of Collaborative urban Transformations: the processes that go beyond the dichotomous relationship between the strategical approach and the tactical one. The thesis output is an Open Toolbox made of strategies, tactics and devices to catalyses the challenges, goals and actions of adaptive urban plan, as the Trento Leaf Plan proposed by the TUT research group. The final Manifesto has been proposed to test and implement in other contexts the new planning approach capable to activating the ecological transition, as an adaptive, multi-scalar and interdisciplinary process that leads towards a city more ECO, ACCOGLIENTE, ACCESSIBILE, SMART and BELLA.

Climate change is directly or indirectly affecting cities, regions or even nations in multiple ways. Impacts are exponential and repetitive with increased instability of climate pattern, socio-ecological systems, increased inequalities and distribution of resources. It is therefore necessary that social and economic hubs and potential resource rich region should become the catalyst that encourages the focus on climate change policies. Despite having various international and national climate change frameworks and forums it is unclear how international, national and even local governments develop response actions to climate concerns and integrate them into different spatial scales. Developing and mainstreaming effective response actions to climate change into numerous sectors, cross-sectoral policies is a complex issue which has plagued policy makers at different spatial scales and on different policy arenas. In order to efficiently integrate and sensitizing society towards climate change issues, decision makers and different stakeholders have to develop insightful information bases, share awareness of climate change risks, vulnerability patterns and finally develop response actions at all level of policy preparation through policy integration, implementation or structural reforms. This study contributes towards understanding climate change risks and perception within spatial planning policies at local level. This has been undertaken by investigating, testing or developing real spatial planning policies, vulnerability assessment frameworks and decision support systems that aim to improve current spatial planning tools intended at building climate resilient living spaces. This study was divided into three main stages 1) To develop and test an assessment framework to track integration of climate change issues into spatial planning, 2) To identify hot spots of climate change at urban/regional levels by applying spatial vulnerability assessment tools and 3) To apply eco-system based adaption responses to climate change in an urban region and identifying barriers. Drawing the case study from India, in the first stage, an attempt was made to understand how spatial plans in India are incorporating climate change issues and identifying potential gaps. Spatial plans across various cities in India were examined with the help of a review framework that was developed upon Moser and Loer’s (2008) work on ''Managing climate risks''. The second stage presents a climate change vulnerability assessment framework and its working methodology at local spatial scale, considering three main components: exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The vulnerability assessment framework was applied to an urban area in India, namely, Bangalore and a hill district of Eastern Himalaya namely Darjeeling. In the final stage of this study, ecosystem services based adaptation responses within spatial planning was studies to understand how it can increase adaptive capacity and address climate changes issues. The results of this study identified key concerns to climate change issues and its integration in India. The policy analysis shows that the role of spatial plans to integrate climate change issues at local levels like urban areas and regions in India are still limited. Local policies and spatial plans shows low level of awareness, moderate level of analytical capability and limited action responses to integrate climate change issues at local level. Spatial policies in India are still limited to physical and economic issues and undermine the issues of climate change. The application of vulnerability assessment framework demonstrated that it successfully provided a spatial assessment of climate change vulnerability patterns. The spatial pattern of vulnerability identifies areas requiring urgent attention to adaptation action, enabling policy intervention and prioritizing action. At the same time an analysis of the perception of people also confirmed the results of vulnerability assessment at local level. Finally the results showed how ecosystem services based response actions when applied within spatial planning can play an important role to mitigate the effects of climate change and adapt to local climate concerns with least negative repercussions. The findings of this study creates a platform for discussion on decision making process and the potential aspects where climate change issues can become a part of spatial planning policy. Climate change mitigation and adaptation for short terms may fulfill objectives for current climate scenarios but may impose externalities in future. So, policy makers and local development organization need to carefully narrate future climate resilient scenarios. This study is the reflection of the interrelationship between the existing information bases, knowledge gaps, policy preparation practices, analytical capability, participation and technological innovation in climate change integration at local spatial scale.

Sustainability while being definitely a new form of humanity, as it has been proposed and dealt with in many urban and landscape projects lacks often of an essential characteristic of the anthropic space: seduction. We believe that Sustainability has to find its own power of seduction if it is to compete successfully with the ambiguous but established charms of the unsustainable city. From all the above it is clear the importance of the ‘Aesthetic of Sustainability’ as fundamental for the success of a new model of green planning not just from an environmental and economic point of view, but, perhaps and most importantly, from a social and mental one. This research investigates the possibility to look at Sustainability and Aesthetics through the lens of evolutive processes and the complexity theory to inform a new Bottom Up/Self Organized approach as a possible morphogenetic process for sustainable city design. Often criticized as the theory of ‘out of control’ the complexity theory applied to the urban could instead be the enabler of a new paradigm where the notion of single authorship with intellectual ownership and his aesthetic language is substituted by the concept of a collective and a new aesthetics of choice where the Aesthetics of Sustainability is that action on the psyche, negotiating between personal subjectivity and collective subjectivity, as a form of knowledge, a process, and a tool for aesthetic creation that cannot be separated from the socius and the environment.

Ecosystems contribute to human wellbeing though the provisioning of goods and services, also known as ecosystem services (ES). However not all ecosystems provide ES to the same extent and depending on physical characteristics of the ecosystems or their location within the city, ES flow differently. The consideration of ecosystems and ES in the planning practice can play an important role in coping with urban challenges, aside to their potential to ameliorate quality of life. Urban planning represents one of the tools administrations have to influence the distribution of ecosystems and ES in a city, and to determine the benefits they provide and, more specifically, to re-determine the number, the location and type of beneficiaries reached. Inclusion of the ES concept in the planning practice can lead to strategic the creation or restoration of Green Urban Infrastructures in a city to maximize the provisioning of a specific ES. Despite the awareness of advantages coming from the application of the ES concept in the planning, there is limited evidence about the application in the planning practice. Goal of this work of this work is to contribute to mainstream ES knowledge into practice. Towards the achievement of this goal, it is crucial to understand the extent to which the ES concept is currently included in urban planning, and to identify the type of information that can most effectively support decision-makers and planners in adopting ES knowledge, and specifically Ecosystem-based measures in their “everyday†urban planning. The work is organized in four specific objectives: i) to provide an overview of the current state of the art related to inclusion of Ecosystem-based measures in urban planning and discuss, and use it identify and discuss the main shortcoming and propose possible solutions. ii)0 to develop an approach to estimate the cooling capacity provided by Green Urban Infrastructures to support urban planning. iii) to test the application of ES assessments in two case studies. iv) to develop guidance to support equitable distribution of ES in cities. The ES concept represents a tool to understand the underlying links between ecosystems, benefits provided and human wellbeing: if effectively used and mainstreamed in the planning practice, can be one of the keys for more livable and equitable cities

While ecosystem service knowledge has demonstrated to enhance decision-making at different levels, successfully managing the interface between science and policies is still a challenge. The thesis focuses on cities, and aims to explore the integration of ecosystem services in urban planning processes and tools. A preliminary review of recent urban plans reveals shortcomings in current practices and the potential benefits of a further integration. At the conceptual level, the problem of integration is addressed by building a framework that shows the entry points and pathways through which planning actions affect the supply and demand of urban ecosystem services. The framework is applied to systematise a fragmented scientific evidence, and to select a set of indicators that planners can use to assess the impacts of planning decisions. At the operational level, the integration of ecosystem service knowledge is tested in a real-life planning context dealing with the prioritization of brownfield regeneration scenarios in the city of Trento (Italy). Alternative scenarios are assessed based on the beneficiaries of two key ecosystem services, namely microclimate regulation and nature-based recreation, hence compared through a multi-criteria analysis that allows exploring multiple perspectives and balancing competing interests. The last part of the thesis frames the integration of ecosystem services in urban planning in the wider context of spatial strategies for sustainable urban development. The six main spatial strategies agreed-upon at the European level, including the 'green city' strategy supported by the ecosystem service approach, are compared with the recent development trends of 175 European cities. The results reveal factors that may hinder the implementation of the strategies, as well as potential conflicts and trade-offs that should be carefully considered when aiming at a truly-sustainable urban development.

This dissertation examines the concept of sustainable energy within a urban design context. In essence, the research aims to answer the question: “what role does the city’s built environment morphology play, if any, in the sustainability of its energy system?”. To answer this question, I first derive an operational definition of sustainable energy in the post carbon era: maintaining the capability to provide non-declining energy services in time. Providing non-declining energy services, in an urban design context, depends on urban morphologies ability to save and conserve energy, be efficient and produce energy from renewable sources without decrease the level of energy services. In other words we can think of a more sustainable energy urban built environment as one that saves energy, is efficient and produces energy from renewable resources per unit of throughput, with energy sustainability measured by urban morphologies energy performances and throughput measured by land unit. This is a normative framework. It can only indicate relative levels of sustainable energy of urban morphologies. Within a specific urban system this framework can allow us to measure which part of the city produce more sustainable energy urban patterns. To employ this framework I utilize a Spatial Pattern Oriented Modelling approach. The energy performance of an urban morphology metric comes from its basis in the international debate on urban energy sustainability, its ability to account for a specific aspect of sustainable energy and the possibility for its derivation from the spatial pattern analysis. Drawing from the large research based on exploring the role of the urban morphology on urban energy system, I derived several spatial patterns indicators that assess the influence of urban morphology on energy performances of urban settlements. These spatial patterns metrics, combined, enable the exploration of sustainable energy within a given urban morphology configuration. I apply the framework to a case study area located in northern Italy between Alps, the transect Trento-Pergine-Valsugana, utilizing data from different sources and exploring the possibilities given by a high-resolution 3D spatial database, a LiDAR survey, and by a geolocalized human activities database, internet 2.0, for the urban morphology analysis with focus to energy. The Principal Component Analysis is used to estimate the correlation between different spatial patterns indicators while a ranking system, based on arbitrary thresholds and classes, is used to visually compare the scores of different sustainable energy performances of urban morphologies.

This PhD research focuses on the Italian case and analyses the possibility of integrating energy planning with spatial planning, the effectiveness of plan implementation mechanisms, and the prospect of replacing public-led interventions with market tools. Recent innovations in the legislative framework support the inclusion of energy saving and climate change adaptation and mitigation goals in plan implementation procedures.

In the Veneto Città Diffusa, the decentralized urban landscape of the Veneto Region, Northeast Italy, the economic growth of recent decades brought about increased urbanization and agricultural intensification. The process of change has been accompanied by the extension and/or maximization of centralized services of drinking water, irrigation, waste water and drainage to meet greater demands for the provision and disposal of water. Accordingly, the structure of a formerly poor rural landscape has been adapted to support an affluent industrialized and urban one. However, all this has had detrimental side effects, which, in time might seriously compromise the quality of life in this landscape. On one side, the transformations that occurred have in fact given rise to unexpected problems of drought, flooding and pollution of water; and recent changes in climate patterns have further intensified these risks. On the other side, the long term fine grained carrying structures of the landscape fabric –like roads, field ditches, stream and river corridors, dirt roads, paths etc.-, as the very basis of the landscapeâ€TMs unique ecological diversity, and once used to convey the areaâ€TMs flows now risk general extinction. The existing road system is also increasingly under pressure to intensify traffic that creates congestion, pollution and unsafe conditions. From a planning and design perspective, this calls for adequate methods and tools that can help designers to tackle the needs for more sustainable water flows as well as the needs for a recovered ecological integrity (including spatial intelligibility) of this urban landscape. This can be of a great importance also for a better understanding of other territories of urban dispersion which are spreading especially over the European and –although in very different forms- the American continents. The present research aims to contribute to the planning and design answers to these urgent problems. For this purpose, the urban landscape of the Veneto Città Diffusa was approached with principles derived from an Integrated Water Management approach (IWM) that, recently, has been successfully applied in the urban context as an alternative to the technocratic approach of maximizing flows. Storage of water is the key principle, for it can bring about decentralized storage, which means new and different water flow management and spatial arrangements. This can ultimately be obtained through the placement and implementation of small scale and decentralized infrastructures. By focusing on the interrelation between flow patterns and spatial arrangements in a small portion of the Veneto Città Diffusa –i.e. the case study landscape- the study has elaborated and confirmed two specific closely related assumptions. The first assumption is that the recent loss of landscape diversity and the increasing problems of flood, drought and water pollution of the Veneto Città Diffusa are closely related and ascribable also to the processes of centralization of the water flows that accompanied the areaâ€TMs economic growth. The changes of flow patterns and spatial arrangements of the case study area that happened over the last decades were systematically observed in a threefold area-flow-actor perspective. Insights into the present arrangements of irrigation, drainage, drinking water and waste water at the scale of the Consorzio di Bonifica Valli Grandi e Medio Veronese waterboard also accompanied the investigation. The diagnosis showed that the centralized systems arranged to perform greater inflows and outflows, draw heavily on resources and often risk exceeding the regionâ€TMs ecological carrying capacity. Moreover, the centralized arrangement often conflicts with the decentralized character of the settlements. No synergetic relations have been developed between the man-made water system and the existing pervasive fine grained elements of the landscape. Instead, this rich capital asset has been left behind and even neglected. And such forms of negligence have ultimately brought about a massive loss of biodiversity, accessibility and spatial intelligibility of the local landscape. This leads to the second assumption that has been researched: in the decentralized urban landscape of the Veneto Città Diffusa, answers that design measures can give in response to increasing water-flow dysfunctions and loss of diversity can be based on decentralized water storage systems that make use of the existing fine grain structures of local landscapes –ditches, streams, land depressions, former pits, hedge-rows, dirt roads, paths etc.- and promote a local-based utilisation of resources (resilience), while fostering a stronger local identity, biodiversity and accessibility for more coherent spatial arrangements. Building on the Ecological Conditions Strategy conceived by Tjallingii (1996), a set of guiding models was developed. In the models, the principles of Integrated Water Management were tuned to those fine grained landscape elements that still structure the low plains of the Veneto –the built lot system, the agricultural field system, the road system, the stream system and the excavation site system. Principles and models of integration and decentralization drove the exploration of design options for different levels of decentralized management of water in the case study area. The creative design process of learning produced a useful toolbox of design models. The design exploration also proved that the dispersed urbanization of the Città Diffusa can be made suitable to accommodate modern integrated and decentralized water systems that, by re-activating the existing carrying structures, also contribute to recovering the landscape. Decentralized urbanization can actually be an ally in the search for sustainable and legible settlements that also reuse and recycle water locally. Designing an integrated water system that fits with the Città Diffusa and contributes to the ecological integrity of this urban landscape remains an important challenge. The tools that can be of practical help to designers and decision-makers who are willing to undertake this challenge were investigated and worked out. Nonetheless, the way to realize the outlined strategies is complex and affected by uncertainty. In this context more research is needed to investigate the effects of decentralization at the level of the region on one side, and on the other side to investigate how these integrated systems can be set to fit present institutional and market frameworks. In conclusion, the study generated concrete proposals for one or more pilot projects that will be extremely important to creating consensus in the decision process during the testing of models and strategies.

“[…]Landscape” means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors; […]Acknowledging that the landscape is an important part of the quality of life for people everywhere: in urban areas and in the countryside, in degraded areas as well as in areas of high quality, in areas recognised as being of outstanding beauty as well as everyday areas[…]”. The starting point of this research is the innovative definition of landscape, given by the “European Landscape Convention”, that draws the attention to the need of: - examining the territory as a spatial and temporal continuity; - considering the territory transformations as a value; - giving equal dignity to ruined territory, refusing the idea that only beautiful landscape deserve to be protected. Among the several and diverse European studies on infrastructure and landscape relation, the research focuses on marginal areas created by the infrastructure for mobility (road and highway) in the landscape. These areas are lacking a clearly defined function, they are not anymore part of the landscape, but they have not become part of the infrastructure. These areas are defined as infrastructural refuses. The attention is shifted from the design of the road and from the aesthetic of mobility to the new spaces created by the infrastructure in the landscape. Moreover, the research tries to analyze the infrastructural refuses only ex-post, when these spaces have already been created by the construction and use of a road, or theoretically created in-fieri by an infrastructure project that has overlooked these areas, forgetting to design them, or simply not taking into account their existence. The first part of the research is devoted to define the identity of the infrastructural refuse through the critical analysis of the main theories of the protagonists of the international debate supported by the identification of literature related to the topic. The infrastructural refuse is then described through analytical tools (morphology and perception) that show the effects of infrastructural transformation focussing mainly on mobility infrastructure transformation in Trentino Alto-Adige. The case study analyzed is the trunk road 12 on the stretch called Tangenziale di Trento, and more specifically the transformation caused by the junctions close to urban areas. The Tangenziale is a great artery of traffic that often cuts through the surrounding areas leading to real marginal areas. The research then proceeds to the definition of refuse as a value and tries to highlight its potential for transformation mainly by analyzing the strategy of recycling. Different types of re-use of infrastructural refuses are described: the artistic-temporary use, the daily spontaneous use by the population, and finally the illegal use. The research analyzes the mobility infrastructural refuses: outlining possible transformations, design, re-inventions; illustrating the unexpressed features of the places; re-drawing with different connotation signs that have lost their original meaning; eventually reaching the “operatività dello scarto”. Negative actions like abandon, refuse, waste can become occasions to re-shape and re-think the landscape. The results of the research show the possibility to re-think the infrastructural refuse spaces as a reserves of soil, suggest alternatives to the mentality of the compensation and mitigation, calling for the evolution of the protocols of mobility infrastructure design.

This research has started from some issues affecting the debate in progress on policies for landscape and confronts itself with the actuality of a review of some paradigms of interpretation that could substantiate the practice of landscape transformation. The main questions that will be addressed is what the ordinary contemporary landscape is, experimenting the perception as a tool at first of interpretation, therefore potentially operating, from the demands of the European Landscape Convention, according to which “Landscape means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors†. Assuming the landscape perception as a means of expression of the relationship between society and territory, this study develops and tests a methodology for its comprehension, through kaleidoscopic visions which interpret the variety of the situated looks. By means of the methodology we aim to explore how a variety of people experience landscapes and – as a consequence - how they perceive them. The proposed approach refers to the landscape perception as a complex system in its multiple dimensions (physical/natural, symbolic/cultural, personal/ collective) that becomes significant as expression of a contemporary condition of living places. It begets a thinking material to understand values and themes, on which could be possible basing actions and policies for landscape. The Kaleidoscope, which is here proposed as device to represent perceived landscapes, derives from the sense of this research. Actually, the explicit reference to ordinary landscapes implies the awareness that the contemporary landscape can not be understood through a tale made of synthetic and mimetic/typological representations, but is expressed predominantly in ordinary contexts, whose not consolidated images neither shared attributions of meanings exist. The Kaleidoscope has set as a composition of diagrams and narratives, which are translated in looks type and themes for action, contributing to reify the problems the landscape poses as challenges to planning and the perception is offering to return. The research is substantiated by a long experimental stage, when - through an experience of understanding the perceived landscape in a valley place in Trentino - the themes tackled in the theoretical-critical part pit themselves strength the realm of a contemporary landscapes and the specificity of the ordinary ones, which more than others claim the experimentation of interpretative and operational tools. The experience has been set up as a cognitive practice, able to be consolidated and repeatable in the ordinary planning processes. It can therefore be understood as a paradigmatic experience of approach to contemporary landscape.