From NBS to a soft city: a unavoidable step

Abstract

Climate change and its effects call for concrete concern about how cities should reorganize themselves. Cities already today are very different from what we have learned in the manuals for lifestyles, and production. Urban planning must revise its foundations according to the options of reduced emissions, renewable energy, circular economy, zero land consumption. It will have to take a very different way of mixing up the addendums of policies for cities. Instead of a complete theoretical treatment, it is necessary to grasp the signals scattered in the organization of the city, consolidating in new paradigms that are defined and simultaneously experienced. The experiment could concern the formation of a new profile for the cities whose points could define a “Manifesto for the Soft City” in which the elements of planning are revisited in the light of new values and applied to the city today real. The protection of the environment must be practiced with projects accompanying the reasons of nature and the morphology of the places, by size strictly commensurate with needs. Network engineering models for mobility are reviewed as an urban service to people, attentive to user behavior. The green areas given up, never equipped and abandoned, become the system of green networks and soft mobility, rebuilding where possible the ecological continuity, according to a new landscape that keeps together the original morphology and the necessary new transformations. Entrepreneurs will also have to become by administrators of the existing annuity to inventors and recipients of additional marginal annuity, based on the improvement of settlement quality; committing themselves to management quotas and improvement of the surrounding public space.