Trento Urban Transformation. Designing Healthy Cities through Adaptive Urban Planning

Urban areas constitute key hubs of interventions to drive towards sustainable development: affordable housing, mobility, provision of services, ageing, urban health, social segregation, environmental footprint, and climate action have been shaping urban transformation with unpredictable scenarios. Such challenges require an update of urban planning tools, which need to mirror the complexity of urban patterns and to enhance their capacities to focus on multiple pathways and plurality of goals. The contribution presents the research conducted by the Trento Urban Transformation (TUT) research group at the University of Trento as scientific support to the revision of the General Urban Plan of Trento, an alpine city in the north-east of Italy. The research project aims to propose innovative, adaptive, and incremental planning tools to allow flexibility, preparedness to extreme events, and capacity to learn from the past. The proposed city plan draws on a new vision, namely “Trento Leaf Plan”. It defines a strategic vision to cope with urban challenges for a healthier and more resilient habitat. The contribution introduces the general approach proposed, and focuses on three tools that have been experimented to shift from a quantitative system based on control to a metabolic, interdisciplinary, and multiscale plan: spatially explicit vegetation and ecosystem services models, the figure of chief resilient officer and integration of environmental criteria in planning tools.