The distribution of services across a territory generates daily commuting flows, which have a significant influence on the development of the territory and often causes congestion in large areas. This negatively affects the environmental, economic and social components of the metropolitan landscape. Using the graph theory, we constructed and analyzed various (in typologies of transportation and moving time) flow networks in the two main Italian metropolitan areas: Rome (MCR) and Milan (MCM). The analysis of these networks provided us with strategic information on the dynamics of the two urban macro-systems. In particular, the aim of our study was to: (i) identify the characteristics, distribution and direction of the main attractive forces within the regional systems under study; (ii) identify the main differences in size and structure of commuter networks between the two metropolitan areas and between the two regional systems that include the two mother cities; and, (iii) identify the main differences in the size and structure of the two commuting networks by transport modes (private, public, non-motorized mobility) and the travel time. The results highlighted significant differences between the two case studies regarding volume flows, complexity and structure networks, and the spatial extension of the territories that are governed by the two metropolitan areas. MCR is a strongly monocentric urban system with a regional influence centred on the mother city of Rome, while MCM is a diffused polycentric regional metropolitan system centred on multiple mother cities. The findings many have a role in urban planning choices and in the evaluation of policies aimed to favor sustainable mobility.

This paper aims to describe the design strategy adopted in Rome to support and enhance sustainable mobility. It is a strategy aimed at promoting new green infrastructures for urban accessibility, daily sports practice and social inclusion in a historic city, stratified and not very inclined to change. Therefore, the dissemination of this experience is useful for planning a sustainable future for heritage cities that ensures an appropriate and equitable balance between conservation and development. Sustainable mobility is now considered one of the most important challenges for metropolitan areas and large conurbations. In these terms, Rome is a weak city. The city’s great bicycle ring route (GRAB), an integral part of the Extraordinary Tourism Mobility Plan 2017-22, is a key infrastructure for increasing more sustainable and healthier modes of travel, even on a local scale. The GRAB project, whose complex infrastructure provides multiple services, differs from a simple cycle path network. Its complexity refers to an ability to attract different types of users in different types of urban contexts—historical settings, monuments, newer neighborhoods and areas of contemporary urbanization. The project results can be measured first in relation to its progress (already funded, in the executive planning phase, with the approval of the first construction sites expected by 2022). A second important result is the participation of institutional bodies and citizens’ associations, which will oversee the construction and maintenance work as well as infuse into the project a constant vitality, in a true civic ecology perspective. Third, the results are important for enhancing metropolitan area accessibility and the environmental and social re-activation of the areas crossed, achieved directly and through the project’s realization. The GRAB strategy belongs to the new generation of landscape projects that have radically changed the priorities and hierarchies of intervention in the contexts of contemporary urbanization. These projects are based on the ecological analysis of the context but are located close to the fluctuating dynamics of contemporary metropolises and the problems of exclusion and marginality—both spatial and social—linked to the very rapid ecological, economic and demographic transformations.

In December 2022, the COP15 for Biodiversity approved the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a protocol for the protection of planetary ecosystems that complements the Paris Agreement on Climate Change with the aim of preventing the collapse of the biosphere. A global network of areas with different degrees of naturalness and anthropization, capable of halting the loss of biodiversity and reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is projected to extend over 30% of the Earth by 2030 to be further consolidated by 2050. The agreement raises a multiplicity of issues that landscape design engages: the conservation of species and ecosystems of the biosphere; the environmental requalification of degraded terrestrial and marine areas; the equitable management of ancestral lands and the rights of indigenous populations; the protection of cultural landscapes and the support of local communities; the abandonment of both the unsustainable exploitation of territories and the musealizations and vernacularizations at the service of global tourism; the enhancement of the ecological contributions of degraded, exploited or underutilized areas, on the inhabited margins or in the operational hinterlands of planetary urbanization; the stwewardship of contemporary anthro-ecological systems towards new forms of equilibrium, conventionally defined by the terms of sustainability and resilience. In short, the Kunming-Montreal agreement requires us to imagine new forms and structures for the evolution of urban and rural space and, at once, new areas for the resurgence of nature. In the colossal, collective undertaking envisaged, the trans-disciplinary design of the contemporary landscape seems to have the opportunity to conquer vast fields of operation and a key role that goes beyond both the technical action of environmental engineering and the taxidermy of natural and cultural conservation. The design of the landscape is in fact called upon to implant a new meaning on portions of the planet, tiny fragments hidden in forgotten interstices, vast settlement or productive expanses, logistical corridors or segments of natural systems. This issue of Ri-Vista collects reflections, experiences, and cases, from the local to the geographical scale, in which the landscape design is capable to establish new ecologies and new ecosystemic balances, while transcribing in situ new narratives and new topologies, scenarios of re-signification of places and dynamics between society and nature, and, with that, new meanings of our living on Earth.

The project SISMI-Tecnologie per il miglioramento della Sicurezza e la ricostruzione dei centri Storici in area sisMIca (technologies for the improvement of safety and the reconstruction of historic centres in the seismic area)–aims to provide tools and methods for risk reduction and seismic improvement of Lazio’s cultural assets and centres, causing research, intervention policies, and planning to interact in order to support reconstruction choices and foster dialogue with local parties and enterprises. One of the SISMI project’s main elements of innovation consists of preparing modes of integration of knowledge and assessments relating to the various components of a territory’s vulnerability and seismic hazard that can be used in other seismic territories. SISMI project, tested in seismic territories of Central Italy, is a methodology of integrated, multidimensional, and transdisciplinary investigation, in the conviction that the safety of the territory and of historic and cultural assets is the result of a dynamic risk reduction process capable of guaranteeing and promoting the local communities’ resilience, in which both physical/structural and sociocultural elements collaborate.