Resilient Communities and the Peccioli Charter

In this chapter, we examine how we might go beyond common practice within disciplinary domains to explore new ground in three systemic contexts of resilience and community capacity building: health, urban systems, food systems and how those might impact urban design. We then propose how a transdisciplinary perspective might integrate all three into a novel design approach for resilience capacity building, an approach we call Design + Health.

In Italy in recent years we have witnessed an acceleration of earthquakes, floods and landslides: it is a continuous emergency. With what tools is it possible to manage the complexity of these conflicts? How can we re-inhabit the land by turning obstacles into opportunities for the future? Can the landscape become the foundation for a resilient community, or rather become itself a resilient landscape?

Since the dawn of urban age, the issues and values of urban settlement have varied considerably through the centuries, as well as the theory of ideal and perfect urban form, but the importance of urban spatial structure has never been erased. Nowadays, the city is still in the middle of our civilisation, but the relationships between nested socio-ecological systems are more complex because the human–environment interactions are not bidirectional. Last month news told us that the new coronavirus has not been the first case of virus that skips the species, reaching up to man, but unlike other recent viruses it had been–and it still is–the first that after centuries has caused significant social effects on human communities. The overlapping of a mixed and interrelated crisis is attacking the contemporary urban structure, and we need to reshape it in a new adaptive way. The paper analyses the origin and the current status of the syndemic we live in, and collects some examples useful to reshape the urban public space.

Cities are ecosystems of biodiversity, both big and small, which interact over time with nature and with the unpredictable. They are places of regeneration and change which feed off of demolitions, compromises and reuses, often improper.

This chapter focuses on the topic of urban regeneration analysing the role played by the community and promoting the idea of the City as an autonomous collectivesubject which can take care of itself. The analysis also provides insights into the concept of urban resistance by illustrating a few examples aimed at demonstrating that the City can regarded as a community product.

Urban Metabolism is an interdisciplinary field of knowledge which investigates drivers of resource demand in cities through the quantification of energy, materials, water, and nutrient flows. Cities are studied as open systems whose metabolism is the result of the interactions with other—close or remote—anthropogenic systems, and the natural environment.

Currently, having resilient communities is the aim of many cities worldwide. Governments officials, urban designers, planners, architects, researchers, stakeholders, economists, sociologists and even epidemiologists are deeply concerned about reaching this goal. Last year, this goal gained tremendous importance, encouraging governments worldwide to look for implementing different strategies such as economic recovery plan, design guideline for public spaces, safe mobility public transport, new materials and design implementations, and new ways of work and collaborate through distance. However, besides these economic and managerial strategies, there are other components that enhance resiliency among communities such as sense of community and spatial agency. Sense of community understood as a feeling that members have of belonging, to matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment together. The relationship between people and places is dynamic and transactional in nature in which agency is an expression of power. Spatial agency is what defines us (the individual and the collective) through our practices in a specific place. Through this essay, we will illustrate how these two components play a significant role in the edifice of urban life while enhancing resiliency among communities. People and places are deeply intertwined; the design of the built environment certainly could enhance urban resilience, but it cannot do much without strong bonds between people and between communities and cities.

Resilient communities often suffer from illnesses affecting urban regeneration driven by the elite, stimulated solely by economic expediencies, which cannot be solved by reviewing participation procedures alone, improving design devices or innovating implementation processes, but the point of view should be reversed.

The periphery does not exist. Or at least it doesn't exist in the way we have always thought of it. The marginal parts, the non-center, the sprawl, are no longer there or, rather, they are not only around (etymologically periphery = circumference) the established urban fabric. They are everywhere outside and inside the compact city, they are its black holes, they are the city itself.

The impressive and sometimes overwhelming progress of the technology available to record, analyze and represent the complexity of our built and natural environments has been playing more and more a proactive role in effecting our way of behaving and thinking, designing, and building, urging us to revisit also our operating methodologies and objectives.

Franciscan friars used to cultivate vines in the silence of the cloister of San Francesco della Vigna, in Venice. The friars cared daily for this small vineyard surrounded by vegetable beds to produce wine. This field is one of the few vineyards left in Venice today.

The resilience approach seems to be related to the understanding of the concept of strong sustainability (Neumayer, 2003; Voghera & Giudice, 2019), which requires flexibility, integration, and empowerment. Resilience can be a useful lens to interpret the transformative action of territory and landscape, seeking a balance through projects still linked to the landscape in a generic way. A balance that must be multiple, dynamic (Butler et al., 2019; Loupa Ramos et al., 2016) and co-evolutionary (Davoudi, 2012), capable of maintaining the robustness and identity (Aimar, 2019), function and structure of the system (Walker et al., 2004) in adapting to continuous transformations (Adger et al., 2005; Folke, 2016). In this sense, several research topics are emerging, firstly that of landscape resilience. This is a borderline, polysemic concept, whose debate is still opened in the literature, where resilience at the urban scale is discussed through an ecological and landscape approach to urban and territorial design (Meerow et al., 2015). Currently, the landscape approach does not seem to be the right key to build resilience, as the landscape plan is an ineffective tool at the local project scale. Rather, the focus should be on territorial governance and the involvement of social actors. Indeed, there is a belief that landscape can be a lever to engage and empower communities, with place-related and people-centred approaches (ICCROM, 2015). Their contribution would be relevant to increase the inherent resilience of a system (Brunetta et al., 2019), through active conservation (Winter et al., 2018) of cultural and landscape heritage.

Although the Anthropocene has become the scenario in which we act, humanity has not yet reached sufficient levels of awareness regarding the ways in which to act. It is necessary to define new parameters of resilience to re-establish a balance with the cycles that are repeated in nature and to respond, at the same time, to the renewed needs of a society that must deeply reconsider its consumption styles. Urban transformation can actively contribute to this process by acting through a metabolic dimension. A new paradigm must be defined, in which the concept of exaptation applied to architecture and the city can modify, in a variable and creative way, architectures or abandoned urban parts. The transformation of the former coal-fired power plant (Nordktraft) in Aalborg is an example for overcoming the current economic-industrial crisis and preparing for climate change. The project is part of a regeneration process based on sustainability, both from an environmental and socio-cultural point of view, with a vision particularly focused on physical health and on the growth of the relational life of the population.

The contribution asks for a change of perspective, addressing inner areas as motors of innovation and test-fields for new dynamics of development and more adaptive processes, looking at co-creative communities and the potentials and resources specifically connected to space, settlements, and landscapes. The reactivation of small towns can catalyze tourism and community’s resilience through targeted transformations of built heritage and unused building stock, social innovation initiatives, and new forms of production. In order to return to inhabit inner areas, new infrastructures and basic services are needed, but also new perspectives and projects able to radically change production, consumption, and work/life models. Within the framework of the research project “B4R Branding4Resilience”, a research project of national interest coordinated by the Università Politecnica delle Marche (national coordinator Maddalena Ferretti) and that involves as partners the Università degli Studi di Palermo (local coordinator Barbara Lino), the University of Trento (local coordinator Sara Favargiotti) and the Politecnico di Torino (local coordinator Diana Rolando), the B4R of University of Palermo work in Sicani hills in Southern Sicily offers a framework for the region’s development and manages to describe a path to activate “reserves of resilience” for new sustainable lifestyles. The settlement development options that the study display can be used as a model for similar considerations in comparable regions of Europe.

Practice and education are facing a critical turning point. This important momentum for our agencies is an opportunity to build collaborative synergies, enact unavoidable measures, and frame sustainable strategies and tangible interventions for the reimagination of our cities. We need to strive for social inclusion and urban and environmental resilience while contributing to achieving climate goals and building a more human, diverse, and healthier society. As educators, we must be seriously invested in remarking the cultural presence of architecture, facilitating the identification of urgent questions like diverse representation, social justice, affordable housing, services, and healthcare for vulnerable populations, as those are influenced by pre-existing built contexts, and urban and environmental conditions.

One of the current challenges of how cities grow is how reality is measured and validated. Late Capitalism measures and validates reality through private profit and, therefore, appropriated and commercialized the urban and planning policies of the 1800s that secured health, sanitation, equity, communities, and the environment through cities as business and real estate speculation. More recently, information ownership become profitable and subject to economic speculation, distorting information, and creating clusters of self-validation controlling and administering social relationships through privatization of public spaces due to the ability to inform the reality. What would be the means to propose our future ways of living in relation to our environmental commons? How can we secure a real-time system including zoning laws and parameters that include humans, post-humans, and non-humans in a post-Capitalist post-Anthropocene? These issues are addressed in the emergent architecture and urbanism of information, which consists in surveying reality, reading, interpreting, mediating, and organizing information flows identifying conflicts of interests between data acquisition, their representation, and functionality. Ecoinduction III, Rezoning New York Region is an ongoing research that integrates different survey and measuring systems, such as Big Data, simulations, Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to activate in real time a dynamic varying ecological zoning thinking the city as interconnected space-environments. A blockchain technology platform surveys and integrates multidimensional information in a dynamically continuously changing system that can inform the reality in real time. The platform surveys latent environmental ecologies and through zoning activates them and coordinates them into larger regional ecological space-environments.

The climate crisis is the most important challenge that human beings will face in the coming decades. This manuscript aims to explore the more relevant aspects of reuse of materials and circular metabolism, encouraging resilience and sustainability.

Humanity has always dealt with the issue of maintaining, repairing, restoring and/or adapting historic buildings to new uses to respond to the continuously changing needs.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, human capital, combined with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was used as an indicator to assess the state of the welfare of a country, with reference also to alternative indicators such as the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and the OECD Better Life Index (BLI). These indices represent the need to identify advanced forms of development measurement, overcoming metrics that are no longer adequate solely related to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The concept of well-being is no longer tied exclusively to the capacity of collective and/or individual income: quality of life is measured in terms of environmental and social quality, and in the ability of resilient communities to shape the common good.

To build a resilient community, it is necessary to identify a procedure that is attentive to the logic of local cooperation (the “neighborhood unit”) which lays the foundations for dialogue between citizens, inhabitants and institutions. Far from the crippling gears of bureaucracy and the centralization of planning decisions, this is the potential of marginal areas, of frontiers, where the subject manages to organize his own psychic space stimulating the integration between body and environment, between body and nature.The participatory processes, originating from these interactions, which have been widely studied in the international planning literature since the 1950s, are the basis of a methodology that today needs to be developed according to a new ecological and phenomenological approach.“Social Art” and “Social Sculpture”: unexpected links to these can be glimpsed in one of the most significant artists of the second half of the last century: Joseph Beuys. Experiencing the elements of nature helps to recognize the interdependence of everything, the environment as unique. The deeper this experience, the more the body’s relationship with the environment is investigated, and the more respect for nature increases. We believe that the idea of a resilient community can be extended to those communities which, despite not having to deal with a traumatic event or an emergency, are dangerously “dull”, “exhausted” and “dormant” and therefore threatened by lack of initiatives capable of facing the economic crisis and the social changes. A renewed relationship with nature is at the base of every good territorial planning approach, including marginal territories.

Representation can be treated as a code of communication, able to address different referents. The first set is made up of those we can call “experts”, whose in-depth knowledge of the grammar on which the code is built is assumed. Architects, engineers, planners, etc., just to name a few.

Resilient communities need to help build the resilience of their most vulnerable members. Organizations providing support services are integral to ensuring all members of a community have the opportunity to thrive. This literature review examines the role of trauma-informed design (TID) in building resilient communities, drawing on work on the Hope Street project in the UK (onesmallthing.​org.​uk/hopestreet). Furthermore it develops a trans-disciplinary framework aimed at harmonizing understandings of TID as it is seen from different perspectives, namely, criminology and architecture. The paper concludes with commentary on the potential significance of TID to notions of resilient communities and, by extension, resilient cities.

The Reef Architecture project aims to demonstrate the positive transformative power for the activation of latent eco-systemic feedback processes in Miami through the creation of underwater protection sea barriers generated with digitally simulated growth processes. It thrives on the potential that emerges from a coherent utilization of the environment’s inherent ecology for its own transformation and evolution, using an approach based on computationally simulated ecosystems and enabled by the possibilities of large-scale 3D concrete printing technology.

Speaking of material culture today may seem, at first glance, out of date. It has been an instinctive part of human life for about two million years. Traditionally, by material culture, we mean a series of symbolic and practical processes that permeate human activity not as a single episode, but as a collective act. Thus a quite central question in design is: at which material culture may we refer today in such a fast changing scenario?

Nature, conceived as an open system in which we belong to, is and has always been a source of inspiration. Knowledge of living organisms constructed from observation allows the understanding, with ever more precision, of the complexity of the systems that house them. Their permanent dynamics of evolution, adaptation, and emergency, as well as their tendency for varied multiplicities and wide range of redundant and infinite solutions, gives us the opportunity to learn from both the results and their processes.

Cities are a space continuum, having never-ending intricated interactions between citizens and the built-environment. In terms of resilience, the city is a complex adaptive system which means that it has a wide range of configurations depending on a small number of variables.

In Italy, there are communities of courage that face the challenges of metamorphosis through practices of adaptation and experimentation that extend, confront each other and emulate themselves. They are mountain, rural or coastal communities, they are in the peripheral urban districts but vibrant with community life, they are in the historical centres full of industrial, commercial activities that resist the crisis, fight against a decline that risks overwhelming them completely. Italian communities are often far from the news headlines and the statistics tables, but observed and narrated by the watchful eye of scholars, historians, storytellers, walkers, poets, artists; cared for by the skilled hands of architects, landscapers, urban planners, sociologists, economists; and governed by the enlightened minds of decision-makers, administrators, of institutions and associations. There are hundreds of "Resilient Communities" that experiment, often without secure protocols, with the new urban circular metabolism through the integration of water, waste and energy cycles, which recover artisanal skills and introduce innovative manufacturing, that are rooted in the local sustainable mobility infrastructures and connected to the global digital infostructure, practicing the interconnection between green networks, cultural armour and slow life cycles, and who spread technological skills and process innovation within local government.

The Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale intends to propose a vision of Italy as a "Nation of Resilient Communities", a country composed of thousands of practices for urban, social and digital innovation that emerge from their isolation, become ecosystems, which can fight the urban revolution of the transition from the erosive, predatory Anthropocene to a generative, responsible Neoanthropocene, in which humanity, after becoming aware of the current development model has generated an unsustainable ecological footprint, takes on the responsibility of adopting new generative behaviours, takes charge of using new approaches, technical tools, takes on a new sustainable development agenda after being the main responsible of the environmental crisis, within a renewed circular alliance between practices, disciplines, institutions and people.