Enhancing the resilience of the urban system. A study for the city of Parma (I)

The eleventh objective of Agenda 2030, is to "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable," combining protection and preservation of the cultural and natural heritage with citizens’ rights to livable conditions in Parma, especially the more at-risk populations. In a context of ongoing climate change, considering the city as a complex system, subject to endogenous and exogenous factors which determine situations of fragility, leads to conceive resilience as the recognition that the apparently stable state, both natural and social, can suddenly change. The cascading effects that result can lead to very different conditions from the original state. However, as recalled by the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (Unesco 2011), it is necessary to safeguard the identity of the city, which derives from the commingling of the historical urban landscape and its immaterial value, placing on equal levels the historic and contemporary meanings of the built environment. The creation of green infrastructures and ecological networks to counter or reduce landscape fragmentation, is an important strategy for adaptation to climate change. It will become progressively more difficult to return connectivity and permeability to the environment, especially in urban areas. The adaptive solutions will need to be examined in depth and be differentiated with respect to the morphological characteristics of the urban environment and also be related to its immaterial value. As in the past, the 'renaturalization' of the city can take on a range of meanings: social, historical and cultural, as reflected in its historical representations. The study that we intend to present will deal with possible adaptive strategies, which result from the intersection of different disciplines and programming tools, supported by the assessment of risk induced by climate change on the fragile segments of the population. The treated case refers to the city of Parma, where the delicacy of treatment that the historic city requires, is combined with the reconsideration of the large green spaces which characterized the popular economic housing districts, with strong planning intentionality and unitary design, realized after World War II.