The international debate on resilience has grown around the ability of a community to prepare for and adapt to natural disasters, with a growing interest in holistically understanding complex systems. Although the concept of resilience has been investigated from different perspectives, the lack of understanding of its conceptual comprehensive aspects presents strong limitations for spatial planning and for the adoption of policies and programs for its measurement and achievement. In this paper, we refer to “territorial resilience” as an emerging concept capable of aiding the decision-making process of identifying vulnerabilities and improving the transformation of socio-ecological and technological systems (SETSs). Here, we explore the epistemology of resilience, reviewing the origins and the evolution of this term, providing evidence on how this conceptual umbrella is used by different disciplines to tackle problem-solving that arises from disaster management and command-control practices to augment the robustness. Assuming the SETSs paradigm, the seismic and structural engineering, social sciences and history, urban planning and climatology perspectives intersects providing different analytical levels of resilience, including vulnerability and patrimony from a community and cultural perspective. We conclude that territorial resilience surpasses the analytical barriers between different disciplines, providing a useful concept related to complex problem-solving phenomena for land use planning, opening a new research question: how can territorial resilience be measured, acknowledging different units and levels of analysis aiding decision-making in spatial plans and projects? In attempting to understand a resilient system, quantitative and qualitative measurements are crucial to supporting planning decisions.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the need for innovation in the landscape policies that were proclaimed by the European Landscape Convention (ELC), which promotes a change from policies stressing conservation to policies stressing a management approach to planning new landscapes. This change focuses on the need to define a new methodological approach to evaluate and promote landscape values as well as to define a process leading to shared values in reference to landscape. This article begins its research with the recent implementation of the ELC in some European Countries. On this basis, it presents an alternative definition of landscape, discusses the role of landscape evaluation, and identifies the different types of values involved in landscape.

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.

The concept of ‘resilience’ breaks down silos by providing a ‘conceptual umbrella’ under which different disciplines come together to tackle complex problems with more holistic interventions. Acknowledging the complexity of Davoudi’s approach (2012) means to recognize that ‘spatial resilience’ is influenced by many phenomena that are difficult to measure: the adaptation and transformation of a co-evolutive system. This paper introduces a pioneering approach that is propaedeutic to the spatial measure of urban resilience assuming that it is possible to define a system as being intrinsically vulnerable to stress and shocks and minimally resilient, as described by Folke in 2006. In this sense, vulnerability is counterpoised to resilience, even if they act simultaneously: the first includes the exposure to a specific hazard, whereas the second emerges from the characteristics of a complex socio-ecological and technical system. Here we present a Geographic Information System-based vulnerability matrix performed in ESRI ArcGIS 10.6 environment as an output of the spatial interaction between sensitivities, shocks, and linear pressures of the urban system. The vulnerability is the first step of measuring the resilience of the system by a semi-quantitative approach. The spatial interaction of these measures is useful to define the interventions essential to designing and building the adaptation of the built environment by planning governance. Results demonstrate how mapping resilience aids the spatial planning decision-making processes, indicating where and what interventions are necessary to adapt and transform the system.