Bioregional planning tools to co-design life places
Framework
The world and Italy are going through a global crisis having climate change, pandemic and even war as its major epiphenomena.
They all threaten mankind and question the linear model of limitless growth, revealing deficits even in the established practices of land use and spatial planning: massive livestock production, extensive farming monocultures, boundless urbanisation, highly polluted urban environments, a purely extractive approach to environmental resources. They have undermined neoliberal globalisation, exasperating conflicts among economic growth, social cohesion and democracy, as well as increasing inequalities and limitation of rights (Milanovic 2016). In this context, cities play a key role: whilst occupying 2% of the earth’s surface, they absorb 75% of global resources and discharge 50% of global waste into the environment; urban areas are the main cause of climatic and environmental degradation (Hosseini 2020), with the 100 largest cities responsible for 18% of global GHG emissions (Moran et Al. 2018).
Due to its morphological and geographical features, Italy plays a peculiar role in the Mediterranean climatic hotspot, where effects of global warming more conspicuous than elsewhere act as a catalyst of environmental disasters resulting from the combination of territorial fragilities with the increased violence of meteorological events: glaciers retreating and collapsing, ruinous landslides, coasts eroded by sea level rise, crops undermined by alien species and desertification, cities ignited by heat and flooded by rain (Liberti 2020). Conventional planning practices have even worsened this situation along time, using a functionalist paradigm to read the territory as a mere “blank sheet” where human activities are to be placed (Magnaghi 2010) to enhance functional performance at the expenses of environmental, landscape and metabolic integrity (Lombardini 2022).
This typically led to single-function, top-down plans and projects, usually related to heavy infrastructure works, completely neglecting territorial maintenance or, at best, using an emergency rather than a prevention perspective to treat territorial degradation and environmental risks.
At the other end of the scale, the weak results of world conferences such as COP 27 show the intrinsic difficulty of global government action in natural resources management: 27 international summits and 2 global agreements – Kyoto and Paris – unfortunately have not even touched climate indicators trends so far. In this framework, no actually effective tool for the shared management of local resources seem currently available: ordinary planning and programming tools usually work on large areas, using too small and abstract map scales with no active involvement of settled communities. But it is just on local communities, stakeholders of common interests and responsibilities instead of private ones, that we need to focus to overcome territorial fragmentation and regain the fertile complexity of life places.
Today, grassroots aggregations of citizens initiate networks and forms of mobilisation which help reinventing public action (Baratti et Al. 2020), entrusting natural resources management to associative agreements for the protection and the enhancement of urban and territorial commons (Magnaghi 2020a).
The many experiences of existing and emerging communities (local neo-agriculture, organic districts, agricultural parks, river contracts, landscape observatories, etc. - Tornaghi, Dehaene 2020, Fanfani et Al. 2022) reveal their ability to generate places, autonomously manage decision-making processes and re-incorporate local economies in self-sustainable ways by feeding integrated territorial supply chains (food, crafts, tourism, landscape, energy) locally connecting production and consumption, thus contrasting the dominance of global economic flows (Poli, Rossi 2020).
It is clear that an effective resource management can only be implemented by involving and working with such communities at a local, detailed scale (Van Knippenberg et Al. 2022), and by building models of collaborative and community democracy in an integrated and multidisciplinary perspective.
The bioregional project, born as a social, spontaneous and multifaceted practice, has been later developed by the scientific community in an environmental (Sale), social (Berg), municipal (Bookchin), political (Latouche), urban-territorial sense (Magnaghi 2014; Fanfani, Matarán 2020; Poli 2019; Colavitti, Serra 2022).
On its base, the Research intends to integrate, in an innovative way, spatial planning and a pro-active involvement of settled communities to provide answers to the emerging problems; thus not
wasting the opportunity, offered by the three crises, to switch the current predatory paradigm. Starting from this approach, it may be possible to renovate territorial planning practices and to implement effective, local, self-sustainable development programmes.