The urban area is characterized by different urban ecosystems that interact with different institutional levels, including different stakeholders and decision-makers, such as public administrations and governments. This can create many institutional conflicts in planning and designing the urban space. It would arguably be ideal for an urban area to be planned like a socio-ecological system where the urban ecosystem and institutional levels interact with each other in a multi-scale analysis. This work embraces a planning process that aims at being applied to a multi-institutional level approach that is able to match different visions and stakeholders' needs, combining bottom-up and top-down participation approaches. At the urban scale, the use of this approach is sometimes criticized because it appears to increase conflicts between the different stakeholders. Starting from a case study in the Municipality of Lecce, South Italy, we apply a top-down and bottom-up participation approach to overcome conflicts at the institutional levels in the use of the urban space in the Plan of the Urban University Center. The bottom-up participation action analyzes the vision of people that frequent the urban context. After that, we share this vision in direct comparison with decision-makers to develop the planning and design solutions. The final result is a draft of the hypothetical Plan of the Urban University Center. In this way, the bottom-up and top-down approaches are useful to match the need of the community that uses the area with the vision of urban space development of decision-makers, reducing the conflicts that can arise between different institutional levels. In this study, it also emerges that the urban question is not green areas vs. new buildings, but it is important to focus on the social use of the space to develop human well-being. With the right transition of information and knowledge between different institutional levels, the bottom-up and top-down approaches help develop an operative effective transdisciplinary urban plan and design. Therefore, public participation with bottom-up and top-down approaches is not a tool to obtain maximum consensus, but mainly a moment of confrontation to better address social issues in urban planning and design.

Taking as an example three study cases in the Costa Brava area, this paper examines the social perception of floods through surveys, interviews and Focus Group sessions. Perception is then related to vulnerability, flood management, and citizen's preferences regarding alternatives to curb flood losses in the future. The study concludes that flood awareness and the willingness to take actions regarding this hazard are clearly related to the degree of social involvement with the affairs of the local community. Furthermore, participatory settings such as Focus Group sessions appear to enable a better environment for assessing and implementing flood management options that attempt to modify human activities rather than modify natural processes as has been frequently the case in the past.

In the province of Concepción (Chile), floods are considered one of the main natural hazards. One of the most important cities of this area is Talcahuano. During the last years, Talcahuano has been affected by a number of flood episodes, as a consequence of an increase in the frequency of extraordinary atmospheric events, along with a higher exposure to the flood risk caused by an intense urban development. On 27 February 2010, an 8.8° earthquake (Richter scale) occurred in central southern Chile and originated the tsunami which flooded a large percentage of the residential area and military base of the Talcahuano city. This flood event affected a population higher than 180,000 people (including 23 casualties and invaluable economic and environmental losses). The objective of this study is to investigate the social perception and knowledge of Talcahuano residents affected by different types of flood, including tsunami, emphasizing which are their risks, vulnerability, resilience and coping capacity concepts. In addition, the kind of measures that have been proposed to improve their capacity to face floods after having suffered the natural disaster will be determined. This social assessment has been carried out based on a survey to permanent residents. Research results reveal that their endogenous and exogenous characteristics have resulted determinant to explain their perception.

La investigación, tiene entre sus objetivos, describir cómo se expresan las capacidades de afrontamiento de la resiliencia comunitaria en relación al sentido de comunidad en trece familias de la comuna de Talcahuano-Chile, durante el periodo de respuesta y recuperación al desastre del terremoto y tsunami del año 2010. Se optó por un diseño exploratorio cualitativo de carácter transversal bajo una lógica de observación ex-post. A los casos de estudio se les aplica una entrevista semi-estructurada, cuyos discursos son examinados utilizando el Análisis Estructural de Contenido y el Modelo Actancial de la Semántica Estructural. Se concluye que la resiliencia comunitaria es un proceso que emerge en vinculación con el sentido de comunidad, expresado en el compromiso por el bienestar de la comunidad del lugar y en la participación comunitaria en acciones colectivas. Estas son condicionantes sociales que facilitan o limitan la adaptación organizativa de la comunidad y el surgimiento de comportamientos colaborativos, en función de resolver los problemas con mayor rapidez y con el mejor desempeño en el uso de los recursos del territorio.