Urban Regenerations, Challenges and Opportunitisies for the Landscapes

Numerous aspects come into play when addressing the issues of urban regeneration and various interventions are necessary to make cities resilient and ready to respond to environmental, economic, and social challenges. Resilience is understood as a "transversal condition" in the reorganization of a city, as the ability to deal with adverse events and externalities is induced by programmatic choices that will significantly change the reference structures and scenarios. The complexity of the new urban scenarios is reflected in the increased difficulty both of understanding and describing the connotations of the contemporary city and of thinking of new policies capable of capturing the signals of change and managing various aspects. The city was almost always saturated and not able to update the range of services and the offer of public spaces in the past, which is something that has changed in recent times. Above all, cities that show a historical delay in the adaptation of public spaces, services, and collective equipment are unprepared at present because they are unable to keep up with the speed of change. It is essential to recognize the changing demand for public spaces, which corresponds to the evolution of living models, to analyze the potential of the growing diffusion of digital technology and the availability of local spaces in the social transition towards the future city. Consequently, this will enable an investigation on how the development of new digital media spaces influences design. The complexity of the new urban scenarios is reflected in the increased difficulty both of understanding and describing the connotations of the contemporary city and of thinking of new policies capable of capturing the signals of change and managing various aspects. The city was almost always saturated and not able to update the range of services and the offer of public spaces in the past, which is something that has changed in recent times. It is essential to recognize the changing demand for public spaces, which corresponds to the evolution of living models, to analyze the potential of the growing diffusion of digital technology and the availability of local spaces in the social transition towards the future city. Consequently, this will enable an investigation on how the development of new digital media spaces influences design. Is necessary: • reduce land consumption, promote de-impermeabilization; • encourage renaturalization, focusing on enhancing ecosystem services in land use activities; • restoration of landscape and green infrastructure by emphasizing its contribution to climate mitigation; • implementation of multi-level regulations and behavioral pathways for combating climate change and strategies for the ecological transition of territories; • incentivizing the reuse of existing, promoting urban regeneration interventions as a strategic alternative to new land consumption. The Special Issue focused on welfare tools, the supply of services and mobility, the landscape standard, the environment, the restoration of the landscape, historic architecture, and cultural heritage. The enhancement of the landscape as an opportunity to regenerate cities. How important is space in the age of advanced technology and what are the expected requirements of its users in terms of quality, shape, size, and function? Are one function and one type of user enough? Is the traditional organization of spaces still feasible, and what are the uses and symbols? Above all, is the space residual (what remains of the physical commitment of roads, public buildings, and private spaces) "public" or is it an urban connective that both welds and cuts through the city and places demands on it? If we shift the focus away from the undifferentiated demand for basic services and towards the increasingly diversified almost individual requests, the hyper-technologies the issue remains complex and prompts numerous reflections. Measures and policies to activate city modernization processes can be implemented through the urban regeneration interventions envisaged by the new European Programming. In the transition towards the era of prevailing technology, the era of the smart city, urban public spaces and services must renew themselves by looking at the challenges that the contemporary world poses and that the future demands by developing proactive performing, and intelligent cities. At the same time, the city must be resilient. Therefore, the cities in which we live today must renew themselves and face the complexity of the issues that arise by the fact that they are "contemporary" cities, cities of change. However, there exists a structural gap: the city is unable to follow the "times" and the speed of the social and physical transformations of the city itself. In the absence of a punctual and adequate design response, the city undergoes planning inertia, the lack of adequate redevelopment interventions, and the rapid extension of the residential, commercial, industrial, and touristic fabric. Cities and territories suffer and experience dilemmas and profound transformations: segregation, immigration, integration, the density and heterogeneity of the urban settlement, the transformations of the use of time and space of communities and cities, urbanization and sprawl, mobility and new populations in transit, being perpetually in crisis, the environmental paradigm, the new information and communication technologies, and the effect of not being a city. The complexity of the new challenges to be faced and how to transform the city has opened a discussion on the current issues that animate the scientific debate and the urban/territorial policy agenda. The idea of developing a Special Issue arose from a variety of issues addressed in the context of the debate on urban regeneration and its relationship to territory, landscape, and current and future transformations. The topic has in fact solicited points of reflection and in-depth analysis in numerous contexts, stimulating interesting multidisciplinary contributions from faculty and doctoral students that have been accepted and published because of their scientific contributions to the topics. The goal of this Special Issue is to collect papers that provide containing insights into the advances in the models of urban regeneration and innovative approaches for resilience for the enhancement of the landscape as an opportunity.