Towards a systemic sustainability. An approach for the development and refurbishment at urban scale

Today Italy is facing relevant challenges related, on one side, to revamping the economy and improving the competitiveness, on the other, to the alignment to European policies concerning greenhouse gas reduction. In this timeframe, a retrofit vision operating onto individual buildings does not represent an efficient and systemic strategy. Given the building retrofit policies as principal contemporary means to address the growth of the building sector, such processes require the involvement of broad urban clusters, disused or suffering degradation, in order to achieve a significant amplification of the regeneration beneficial effects that would help reducing and heal the social, economic and environmental decay. Refurbishment and valorisation processes applied to the urban scale represent an important opportunity for redesigning the territory, identifying and integrating new functions, improving the cities’ architectural quality, and rethinking the means of mobility and urban interconnection. However, given the development and fragility of the territory, the traditional concepts of urbanism require to be filtered by sustainability. It does not mean reaching beyond the buildings scale, but strengthening the link between them to improve the quality of life at every level. Starting form the analysis of the most relevant experiences concerning ‘eco-districts’, the paper presents an evaluation of opportunities and tools to retrofit the territory. It is stressed the necessity of enhancing urban policies and improving the global energy-environmental standards through the promotion of public transport, the valorisation of green gathering spaces, the integration of primary functions, the support to participatory design, the use of renewable energy, the protection of natural habitats, and the pollution reduction.