Urban Planning and Architectural Design for Sustainable Development (UPADSD)

In the past few years, urban population has outnumbered the rural at global scale, and cities, especially in developing and newly industrialized countries, are experiencing a considerable expansive phase. This expansion is often uncontrolled, and it is accompanied by an increase of poverty and social disadvantages, perceived particularly within urban peripheries where, in addition, urban sprawl is causing severe low qualification of the environment. Thus, if, on the one hand, cities can be represented as development drivers, nodes belonging to networks that overcome national boundaries, places where knowledge is produced and re-produced and innovation is generated and transferred, on the other hand they represent the context where unsustainability deriving from this kind of development is most evident, together with its huge range of environmental, economic, social and also cultural contradictions. Degraded green areas in the peripheries act as counterparts to urban parks; the architectural beauty of the city centers, periodically exposed to restyling processes, or areas involved in urban requalification programs, though accompanied by gentrification, contrast with run-down neighborhoods where buildings’ low quality, lacking services and inadequate infrastructure levels cause the wide spread of social deviance and poverty in its diverse forms. Not less evident are contradictions on cultural ground. Cities that should promote their own identity and glean the key from their own development from their cultural peculiarities, are very often inclined to emulate other cities which have achieved meaningful competitiveness performances on international ground, but through logics and planning goals which cannot be replicated in every geographic context. Thus, this tendencies, besides being ineffective and unsustainable in the medium or long term, are the tangible expression of cultural homologation processes that absorb urban identity and waste its endogenous development potential. From this, it derives the importance of a new approach to urban planning, able to interpret territorial needs and attitudes and which can foster the design of actions in order to fulfill territorial potential and valorize its tangible and intangible sources, bringing back centrality to local dimension in its widest meaning. A planning approach “at the service of the territory” instead of favoring, as is often the case, top- bottom choices and planning tools which don’t consider local values and requests of the place where they act, following, on the contrary, external and conforming logics. We refer to formally exemplary but meaningless projects. There can’t be cities’ sustainable development without urban planning but, to be functional to this aim and promote the improvement of urban population’s quality life and a contextual decrease of cities’ ecological footprint, it must be inspired to fundamental principles of sustainability: equity among generations and within the same generation. Thus, urban planning must become a tool able to reduce or limit land and energy consumption, promote social inclusion and cultural interaction, favor networking and encourage the generation of social capital, nurture beauty in all its forms, foster cultural empowerment of individuals and community itself, produce and transfer knowledge. The international conference on Urban Planning and Architectural Design for Sustainable Development, promoted by IEREK in collaboration with UNIVERSITY OF SALENTO has the precise aim to trigger the cultural debate about connections between urban planning and sustainable development, on how the former can contribute in improving our cities’ levels of sustainability and acquire a strategic role in achieving a sustainable development model able to sustain urban expansion and qualify cities’ evolutionary paths.