Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The term resilience entered the vocabulary of urban architects, but remained incomplete: some fundamental elements have been lost in the translation of the pedagogical concept. Coping and human agency haven’t been introduced into urban planning, causing an overestimation of resilience’s potential, understood as a mere capacity for impact resistance. Active adaptation to the environment and awareness of one’s urban action, of the psychological and physical consequences due to the presence of abandoned spaces, are part of the resilience process, as well as the ability to be efficient architects of one’s future. Completing the theoretical framework is necessary to give urban planning the opportunity to understand the complexity of the relationships and settings on which it operates and allows to re-signify some methodologies. Dialogue with the territory and the population is not mere formalities, but a functional tool for designing. Urban planning plays the role of super partes judge, intertwines personal, community, and territorial needs to form a plural and unitary tissue at the same time. It is precisely on this frame that spaces and people are arranged, unaware authors of the virtuous circle described by Jan Gehl ‘something happens, because something happens […]’. Urban planning must be interdisciplinary, it could not be otherwise. Places are intimately cause, and consequence, of life, of spontaneous behaviors and activities that arise ‘here’ and not ‘there’, for the intentions, for the appropriate geographical structures and the favorable political and economic demands of a space compared to another. Places and people are strictly interdependent.