The article looks for relations between growth of expanding cities, number of catastrophes and reduction of inhabitants in inland regions. The study explores these aspects through cartographic readings aimed at highlighting the relationship between soil consumption, the abandonment of peripheral areas, and environmental risks due to floods, landslides and earthquakes. The research analyzes the whole of Italy as a case study between 1990 and 2019 to get an accurate interpretation of the relations between these phenomena. The conclusions alert us to the need to redirect Italy’s development and its resilience projects. The study outlines the need of a re-living plan for Italian inner areas. It would be the only security process really capable of taking care of the territory.

This paper focuses on recognising the underlying component of climate risk adaptation and management that is present at the local planning level. Starting from a comparative analysis of four Italian cities in the Central Veneto Area, the aim is to understand how plans and regulations have already directed their efforts toward adaptation and climate risk reduction over the years, without explicitly labelling these measures as such. This process is carried out by co-ordinating the technicians of local administrations in the recognition and classification of already active measures that can be brought within the framework of combating the effects of climate change. The analysis of the identified measures shows that there is already considerable attention to flooding-related and heat-related issues in the local planning corpus. Understanding this dimension of local planning allows access to a set of adaptation intervention models that are already integrated into the planning system and support incorporating adaptation practices in a more co-ordinated way at various planning levels.

In light of the challenges required by the European Green Deal policies concerning the achievement of climate neutrality by 2050, this paper analyses the suitability of different Italian urban systems for energy consumption and CO₂ emission reduction. In anthropised territories, there are strong relationships between energy consumption, climate-changing emissions and settlement patterns. Lands considered low could increase their rating because they have far greater environmental, energy and land resources than more pivotal ones. After an Italian-scale overview of the ecosystem capacities, this paper develops a detailed study of three exemplary areas: the northeast, the northwest, and the central-west coast. The analysis uses Burkhard’s matrix for ecosystem values and the energy consumption 2021 report of the National Energy Authority. The first finding is that the northeast region, characterised by spread and rarefied urbanisation, has a peculiar suitability for climate neutrality. In the results, spread territories perform much better than centralised ones. The coexistence of little urban cores, space for vegetation and a widespread water network promotes synergies for enhancing an ecosystem approach to land design.

The problem of identifying models of post-disaster reconstruction is an issue that has been dealt with in depth in a number of works, mostly dedicated to individual cases or to the comparison of models. There are also a number of works that have attempted a systematisation on an historiographic basis. To date, however, there is no overall work aimed at constructing a quantitative method for evaluating and comparing reconstruction experiences. This article proposes to establish a scientific method for the systematic classification of post-disaster reconstructions, based on data analysis. The method consists of four phases: the redrawing of cases with a precise replicable technique; the choice of indicators; the measurement of urban development; the classification of cases. The method is applied to cases that are comparable with each other in terms of type of event and period: we have chosen post-World War II reconstructions in Europe given the larger availability of documentation. The paper leads both to the consolidation of the model as effective and replicable and to the construction of the application, which revises the qualitative classification of most of the addressed cases.

This paper examines how a town affected by a catastrophe can be restored by repositioning. We describe how we locally applied a method for building back better with participation. To do it, we merged some already known techniques. We learned three lessons. First, the methodology that we deployed can support a nonconflictive recovery process. Second, the building’s physical forms for the reconstruction according to the preferences of residents must be deeply investigated before proposing a model. Third, a post-disaster recovery plan has several problems in application, and where possible a pre-disaster recovery plan is preferable.