Bioregional planning tools to co-design life places
Project
The BioCode research aims at developing, in a bioregional perspective, a set of agreement planning tools for the co-management of natural resources and the co-design of local projects involving and empowering local communities. These tools can be applied and adapted to different contexts as a form of actualisation of the horizontal subsidiarity principle, and can prove effective in order to face the increasingly extreme events due to climate change and to other global fragilities, such as current health and war crises.
Conventional spatial planning has often just poorly addressed such “entropic” criticalities, mainly related to uncontrolled urban growth (waste, energy, deforestation, ecosystem occupation), and has even contributed to their aggravation, proposing answers still based on hierarchical centre-periphery models and on the primacy of technological/functional solutions. Assuming instead a bioregional, reticular and collaborative approach towards humans and nature, the Research may be able to achieve goals of regional cooperation and “self-containment” of matter and energy flows which seem vital steps to real resilience and sustainability.
This experimentation of “bioregion-based solutions” aims at encouraging and supporting the formation of “bioregional project communities” including public authorities, active citizenship, social and economic actors in a variety of agreement forms; and at providing them with tailor-made governance toolkits for the patrimonial management of natural resources, thus paving the way to forms of territorial self-government based on horizontal subsidiarity among places. Such a programme is organised around four objectives:
1. Definition of a framework for the analysis of existing bioregional practices;
2. Definition of a methodology for the triggering of effective forms of mutual exchange between expert and contextual knowledge;
3. Definition of a methodology for effective community practices of co-management and co-design of natural and cultural resources within the territory;
4. Denotation of sets of indicators apt to assess the integrated wellbeing linked to a correct management of natural resources.
The five multidisciplinary RUs are coordinated by scientists in the field of Urban and regional planning. However, they encompass also broader fields related to natural resources management (ecology, agroecology, environmental economy, rural economy) and to territorial sciences (geography, anthropology, bioeconomy, representation, ICT, participatory co-design). Each RU plays a specific role within the common project, by applying transversal, specific and/or integrated expertises to research/action contexts they are already operating on: strategic municipal plans, local urban plans, national parks, ecomuseums, food communities, river and valley contracts.