The unresolved territories are privileged places for the proliferation of degradation phenomena that affect the environment and human well-being. The impacts of their critical conditions go beyond the limits of the damaged urban fragments, involving the built environment, society, economy, culture, and conditioning quality of life. This paper proposes a methodological approach to landscape design supported by an evaluation framework to orient strategic design planning with specific attention to unresolved territories consistent with the circular economy perspective. The circular city principles are applied to landscape spatial planning, by operationalising Ecosystem Services, Landscape Services, and Ecosystem Disservices, as interpretative categories for multi-dimensional regenerative strategies. Starting from a theoretical framework, the objective of the analysis is to implement an approach to the regenerative design of landscapes of waste, defined wastescapes. The industrial area of East Naples is the case study where an incremental evaluative approach has been defined to design scenarios to provide services and values, aimed to drive the conversion in a regenerativescape. A multi-criteria analysis through preference ranking organisation method for enriched evaluation (PROMETHEE)-GAIA method has been implemented to compare the base case scenario with two incremental new scenarios and identify situated sustainable priorities.

The study of the city as a living organism in constant transformation is especially linked to the investigation of its metabolic flows and their impacts on urban systems. The interplay of urban metabolic flows with the natural and anthropic landscape, including the built environment and its discarded parts, is connected in various ways. Urban Metabolism has been mainly studied by environmentalists and engineers so far, but it is recently acquiring growing significance also for urban planners, architects, and policymakers to determine and evaluate the impacts of human transformation on the human-natural ecosystem. Considering the urban landscape and the metabolism of its resources as an integrated system requires the recognition of which materials, methods, approaches, and general issues should be considered in planning and design for the transition toward a Circular Metabolic Urban Landscape. The process of transition to circular cities should necessarily involve actors from different research fields. Thus, this study aims at systematizing the recent and constantly evolving knowledge on this topic. This chapter presents a Systematic Review of the recent scientific literature by analyzing the production of the last 10 years on Urban Metabolism and Circular Economy in the context of spatial design and planning. The criteria set as a guide were made explicit through the coding of the selected papers by employing ATLAS.ti and grouping the subjects coded in five main clusters: theoretical issues, UM-specific topics, planning and design research, interdisciplinary studies and research and applications, and open issues. A semantic network links the cross-disciplinarity topics. The challenges and research topics to consider for a Circular Metabolic Urban Landscape are then considered as a set of links in the recent scientific literature selected.

This article analyses the effectiveness of circular economy principles applied to the peri-urban territories of Naples, carrying out three integrated “eco-innovative strategies” developed within the H2020 REPAiR project (REsource Management in Peri-urban AReas). The main purpose of the research is to combine the rationalization of waste flows and land recovery. Waste, from scattered materials, turns into new resources for the peri-urban areas. The authors intend to describe how it is possible to create a synergy between urban crisis and technological tools working to improve the metabolism of the peri-urban context. Through the agency of mappings, as holders of knowledge and tools, strategies and scenarios are proposed. Such a process allows the research to create a synergy between two disciplines, one belonging to metabolic rationalization of flows and the other related to urban planning and regeneration of ecologically compromised territories. Thus, the peri-urban space, re-using its waste materials, is re-read and re-designed as a complex and compelling landscape system.