Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) represent a possible solution to facilitate the transition to carbon neutrality and reduce energy poverty in urban areas. Although the topic has received little attention from urban planning scholars and practitioners, they can make a significant contribution in the enhancement of RECs. To this end, this article proposes a methodology that allows identifying priority urban areas where the Municipal Urban Plan can incentivize RECs’ establishment. These areas are spatially identified where a minimization of the constraints on RECs’ formation and a maximization of their energy and social benefits are expected. The application of the proposed methodology to an Italian municipal area where the Plan is being drawn up is presented. The obtained results show how priority areas can be found both in the urban center and in rural areas, suggesting that urban planning can encourage different REC configurations, depending on the settlement fabric and land use, as well as the number of buildings to be clustered and potential leaders who can lead the community development process.

The objective of this study is to explore the use of emerging technologies such as the Metaverse and Digital Twin to highlight how these can be used to analyse and improve the perception of security in urban parks. Through the proposed methodological approach, which combines real data collection, 3D modelling, immersive simulations, and user feedback, a virtual environment representative of the Quartieri Spagnoli Park in Naples, chosen as a case study, was developed and tested. The experimentation involved a heterogeneous group of users and consisted of two phases of questionnaire administration, one in person and one in a virtual environment, to compare the individual and collective perceptions of users in relation to issues such as disorientation, lighting, and maintenance. The results obtained made it possible to identify a correspondence between the data collected in the two environments, and to highlight any critical issues that emerged. Undoubtedly, the virtual experience proved to be useful, accessible, and immersive, demonstrating the potential of these tools not only in identifying issues but especially in supporting participatory design and urban planning with a view to a smart city. In urban design, as in many other fields, being able to intervene and test changes in a virtual environment before actually implementing them is a valuable opportunity, as it allows the feasibility to be assessed without compromising the real space. It is precisely this aspect that makes this type of approach extremely interesting and important. The distinctive feature of the proposed approach lies in the implementation of digital twins in the metaverse, which can perform a dual function: simulation and verification. In the first case, simulations within the virtual environment allow project planning to be tested in order to predict the outcome; in the second case, it is possible to investigate the state of affairs, thus assessing whether the planning put in place has achieved the desired results.

As cities and poverty continue to grow worldwide, both spatial and a-spatial peripheralization processes expose entire urban and metropolitan areas at risk of degradation, not just traditional peripheries. The main aim of this paper is to propose a methodology for peripheralization risk assessment, according to the general theory of territorial risk, in order to identify priority areas where mitigation actions should be envisaged through urban and territorial planning. Such an approach constitutes the novelty of the work. So, peripheralization risk is defined for the first time, depending on aggregated vulnerability and exposure. Based on a literature review, a set of vulnerability indicators structured in three dimensions is defined in order to construct the composite vulnerability index in the Italian geographical context. Due to the absence of well-established threshold values, an aggregation method based on fuzzy logic is used. The methodology was applied to a conurbation of 16 municipalities in Campania Region (Italy). Obtained results showed that areas most at risk can be both peripheral and central neighborhoods, but also entire municipalities, demonstrating how mitigation actions are needed at different planning levels. Since the necessary input data are ordinarily available in planning processes, the proposed methodology can be transferred to other geographical contexts.

The work concerns the fight against the decline and depopulation in the Inner Peripheries (IPs), a phenomenon taking place globally and throughout Europe, where it has reached an alarming dimension, causing regional disparities that threaten the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals. In Italy, where the term Inner Areas (IAs) is used as a synonym, more than half of the municipalities have the typical problems of IPs. As the latter have a supramunicipal nature, provincial strategic spatial planning is considered adequate to counter these critical issues, assuring a balanced and sustainable development in the social, economic, and environmental domains. To this end, after the state-of-the-art review, this paper proposes a methodology for the construction and mapping of a Decline Index, useful for spatially identifying the most critical municipalities which provide priority strategies to counteract decline through the Provincial Territorial Coordination Plan. The method is based on a multicriteria analysis approach in which Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is integrated and applied to the case study of the Avellino Province in the Campania Region (Italy), which contains many municipalities belonging to IAs. The proposed method is also useful in supporting regional planning and programming for territorial cohesion and sustainable regional growth.