Retail activities and cities are closely related. The practices of retail-led regeneration can thus bring real benefits to the quality of urban life and play a key role in the construction of self-organised and bottom-up initiatives. It seems essential, therefore, that there be the involvement of all the actors working within various capacities in urban areas and who have a legitimate interest in the construction of integrated and efficient urban policies. For example, the Business Improvement Districts – widely used in the US and the UK – are forms of voluntary management for the development of competitive strategies in view of the revitalisation of urban retail developments authorised by the government but promoted and managed by private operators. On the basis of international experience, Italy has also begun to introduce the idea of new instruments for territorial governance within regional trade legislation. These are promoted by the government and managed by non-state actors for the integrated management of business in relation to urban revitalisation. From this perspective, the paper describes the Italian model for the voluntary management of retail activities by outlining the importance of self-organisation and private sector for the promotion of territories and the real contribution that retail can make to local development and urban regeneration.

Building resilient cities is becoming increasingly vital due to the rise in urban challenges such as climate change, socioeconomic disparities, and pandemics. While the concept of resilience is gaining popularity, many scholars argue that existing resilience plans do not adequately address social equity issues. Therefore, this study investigates the incorporation of equity into resilience planning by conducting a case study analysis of ten European resilience strategies. The employed methodology is summative content analysis, and the approach is inductive. For each resilience strategy, the incorporation of three equity dimensions—distributional, procedural, and recognitional—is examined. The results show significant variation in addressing equity dimensions across the case studies. Although some plans do not effectively address equity, others integrate it more comprehensively and successfully. Thus, we argue that resilience planning can potentially contribute to social equity issues, although currently, this contribution is not sufficient. We recommend a number of strategies by which future resilience planning can enhance its contribution. These are: promoting structural transformations, considering the political processes of resilience building, adopting participatory approaches to co-create resilience plans, fostering trust and accountability between citizens and governing bodies, favouring a systemic view, and prioritising the upstream inequality factors for building capacity.

The concept of resilience has been developed for over 40 years in different disciplines. The academic discussion on defining resilience is thriving to create interdisciplinary understandings and meanings. Simultaneously, resilience has firmly entered into planning practice to address vulnerabilities and cities' exposure facing to present and future hazards particularly related to climate change effects. In the last twenty years, a growing number of cities are adopting local climate actions, and urban resilience is also gradually a crucial part of international and national policies worldwide. Despite the increasing attention to urban resilience, its implementation at the local scale and the required increasing ambition are still lagging, also due to a lack of dialogue among researchers (the scientific level), policy-makers (the normative level) and practitioners (the operational level). Following the 2018 CitiesIPCC Research and Action Agenda recommendations, this paper contributes to improving understanding barriers, opportunities, and needs for science-policy-practice dialogue for urban climate resilience. The paper analyses the urban climate resilient strategiesstrategies of the Italian metropolitan cities, concluding that a science-policy-practice dialogue is lacking in implementing evidence-based climate change resilience policies and actions actions at the local scale. Starting from the Italian case study, the paper suggests an iterative process to unlock the science-policy-practice dialogue for contributing to operationalise urban climate resilience fostering thanks to a multiscalar governance approach.

Spatial planning affects the way in which cities are created and developed, as well as their economics and welfare. It does so by constructing institutional frameworks that frequently undergo states of contradiction and demands for adjustment and revision. This situation is particularly evident by looking at the way in which urban facilities have been planned during the twentieth century. The article explores the issue of urban facility planning in Italy by taking into account the adaptations of the institutional framework governing and regulating their supply. In particular, it explores the central contradictions which guided reforms and revisions of urban facility planning in Italy, starting from the post-war period until now, and the main problems left unsolved after years of attempts at innovation aiming at a more flexible and quality-oriented approach. In order to contribute to this debate, specific policy implications and devices are presented.