Editorial
Creators: name: Fusco Girard, Luigi
Publisher: name: BDC. Bollettino Del Centro Calza Bini
Year: 2013

description: The outcome of the United Nations Conference in Istanbul in 1996 was the Habitat Agenda, a global action plan for the sustainable development of human settlements.

In 2001, a plenary assembly was held at the United Nations in order to verify its effectiveness and implementation status all over the world.

Then, in 2002, the Habitat Agenda was published also in Italian by the Department of Architectural and Environmental Heritage Conservation in the book entitled Habitat Agenda/Agenda Habitat. Verso la sostenibilità urbana e territoriale, describing some experiences concretely realized.

Today the Habitat Agenda needs to be updated because it could not predict the extraordinary changes occurred over the latest 20 years.

Increasingly, the wealth of a country/region is represented by the wealth produced in its cities. However, cities are also major generators of entropy: they are the most significant source of pollution/environmental degradation, climate destabilization, etc., that adversely affect the health and the economic conditions, too. It represents a source of significant waste of resources and dissipation of wealth: an economic damage that, in the current conditions of crisis, is not affordable.

The starting point of the new urban regeneration strategies is the intertwine with the environmental strategies and with the regeneration of local economy ones.

On one hand, the above calls the search for a more efficient, effective and sustainable new organizational strategies, making it possible to minimize waste throughout the production cycle and consumption. The increased efficiency/effectiveness/productivity in the use of natural resources, achievable with the reuse, recycling and regenerating (i.e. circularization through virtuous and symbiotic processes of economic and ecological exchanges) reduces/minimizes emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases (with health benefits of ecosystem and people) and, at the same time, it is a source of economic benefits arising from the cost reduction of waste and of resources and modernization of the production system.

On the other hand, the above calls for a new national policy for the city (i.e. for local development) much more vigorous than the existing ones: in cities we build the future of societies. Cities should become the most important partners of the activities of the central government. The local (economic, urban, infrastructure, energy, environmental and health) planning becomes therefore a fundamental tool for the promotion of the development of the entire country.

The implementation of the “regenerative model” toward a human sustainable development requires new approaches and new tools. Urban planning should contribute to local economy, being much more based on an ecological dimension and sustained by social (third sector) economy.

Symbiosis between industries, between industrial and port areas, between port areas/industrial system and city, between the city and the territory can provide high environmental and economic benefits.

To manage them, new decision-making support systems and evaluation tools are required.

Cities may take on a care role in launching a smart sustainable development model, starting from local cultural resources for the activation of the creative processes of a circular economy through a synergistic approach, combining the economic, logistic and industrial activities, with the cultural heritage regeneration and the creativity of its inhabitants.

This issue of Journal BDC, starting from the synthesis of the final document of the Sixth Word Urban Forum (see Joe Ravetz, Luigi Fusco Girard and Lisa Bornstein, “Draft synthesis of the final document of the Meeting ‘Port Cities as Hotspots of Creative and Sustainable Local Development’”, BDC, 2012, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 67-69), provides many theoretical and practical contributes about the implementation in urban development strategies based on the circular principles.
description: BDC. Bollettino Del Centro Calza Bini, Vol 13, N° 1 (2013): Towards a Circular Regenerative Urban Model