Contemporary cities face environmental, social and economic challenges that highlight the vulnerabilities of urban structures, spatial connections, infrastructure and socio-economic systems. These critical issues have been amplified by the pandemic and the intensification of climate change, generating significant impacts on the territory. In this uncertain context, urban planning plays a crucial role in responding to the new needs of cities, promoting proximity and environmental sustainability, and encouraging adaptation and proactive responses to change. The research aims to promote strategic planning based on an integrated and multi-scale approach, capable of generating synergies between the various complex aspects that characterize urban environments. This approach allows spatial relationships and considerations to be articulated at different scales, from the territorial to the local level, translating urban challenges into multi-level actions and strategies. However, this requires a supporting structure on which to articulate multiple urban planning strategies, resulting from the overlap and interrelation of two complementary design urban backbones: the proximity one, aimed at connecting services and public spaces through wide slow mobility networks; the natural one, aimed at integrating green areas on different scales, with both ecological functions, to promote biodiversity, and social functions, to improve collective well-being and strengthen the resilience of the urban ecosystem. The complementarity of these two backbones was explored through the revision of the Territorial Government Plan of the City of Mantua, particularly within the Services Plan, as part of the research project entitled “Re-knowing Urban Complexity through New City Awareness: In Search of Urban Proximity Systems.” This research provided an opportunity to read and interpret the urban complexity of the city while guiding effective, sustainable, and resilient intervention strategies in response to its ongoing transformations.
Borini et al. (Fri,) studied this question.