UPLanD - Journal of Urban Planning, Landscape & environmental Design

Circular Economy strategies for Adaptive Reuse of Borgo San Leonardo in Carlentini

Carla Di Giorgio — 2024-12-25

Reuse of the built heritage is a strategy for enhancing the architectural heritage, designed to start virtuous development processes with positive impacts on the landscape. Adaptive reuse is a significant approach in circular economy practices to extend the life cycle of building by lengthening the use and delaying the end of life. As a result, the reuse of abandoned buildings can enhance the surrounding contexts, achieving ecological benefits and implementing social responsible economic growth. Borgo San Leonardo in Carlentini (Italy) is an example of disused rural heritage in a context of high landscape value and development potential, characterised by a common type of dwelling in the Syracuse area. The area has been declared of outstanding public interest and still retains its perceptual-cultural, morphological-dimensional, and material-constructive values. The regeneration of rural heritage seeks to place communities at the centre of decision-making processes in these territories, aiming to preserve the local productive culture and traditions while activating new development processes. The case study describes the decision-making process related to the definition of new uses, through a multi-criteria and participatory approach. The outcomes are guidelines to choose new compatible uses for old buildings, able to activate circular development processes. This will be achieved through a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), in order to compare adaptive reuse alternatives, considering the impacts on the environmental, cultural, social and economic systems

Generate communities: the voice of the inhabitants of the Fuorigrotta neighbourhood in Naples

Chiara Mastrorilli — 2024-12-26

To counter the dangerous trend of neglect and abandonment of places, synonymous with territorial decay and fragmentation, landscape policies must aim to enhance the active role of local communities in the management and decision-making processes concerning those territories, with particular attention to younger generations. The analysis of perception, and consequently the image of urban spaces as an aggregate of all stimuli, is a fundamental step in understanding the relationship between the built environment and the people who inhabit or use it. This allows for a deeper exploration of community needs, moving beyond a purely analytical assessment to consider temporal, spatial, and behavioural dimensions. A perceptual analysis enabled a comprehensive understanding of the issues affecting the Fuorigrotta neighbourhood in Naples, identifying potentially transformable spaces and formulating intervention strategies and guidelines to be applied in an initial phase of spatial transformation. The described approach, capable of generating public spaces of aggregation and sociality where communities can feel fully involved and completely represented, fosters respect for places and promotes their ongoing care and maintenance

The permanence of the design in the transformation of the urban limit. Messina: the ring road reinterprets the walls

Marina Arena — 2024-12-27

The goal of the paper is to reconstruct a framework of experiences on the concept of urban limit and on the theme of the transformation of the city walls into the road, and to include in this framework the experience of Messina, a particular case of transformation of the layout of the walls to two speeds: one physiological, as happened in other situations, and the other accelerated by the destruction following the 1908 earthquake and the consequent reconstruction work