Urban Regeneration Through System Planning and a Multiscalar Approach for a Self-sufficient City: The Case of Santa Maria Capua Vetere in Italy

The contemporary citySelf-sufficient cities is characterisedSanta Maria Capua VeterebyUrban regeneration a high degree of complexity in its environmental and socio-economic processes. Its recent evolution has faced problems related to spatial fragmentation and functional transformations: disused industrial and military areas now form large dross landscapes, while urban degradation and illegal neighbourhoods are common in the outskirts. Urban planning should address these fragilities through the design of inclusive community spaces, taking into account environmental aspects and new social needs. The aim of this paper is to explore local regenerative approaches to create an efficient network of services and public spaces, aimed at restoring the peripheral margins of the urban core, implementing the overall ecological quality and community assets. Indeed, sustainable planningSustainable planning can reveal the latent potential of forgotten urban spaces, laying the foundations for the progressive development of new areas for social use to revitalise their spatial context. Multiscalarity thus becomes a possible approach in urban planning to control the structural, long-term and relevant use of territorial resources, also by means of local-scale planning to verify the coherence of choices at the municipal level. In accordance with these theoretical premises, it is proposed the case of Santa Maria Capua VetereSanta Maria Capua Vetere, a medium-sized town with an ancient cultural heritage that suffers from several socio-environmental criticalities. In order to address these challenges, the planning structure of the city has been calibrated on the definition of multiscalar actions that will be able to adapt flexibly to the new situations generated by the socio-economic dynamics, taking into account the need to protect the urban centre and the surrounding rural areas, and conceiving transformations based exclusively on urban regenerationUrban regeneration. Recent trends in territorial management identify for Santa Maria Capua VetereSanta Maria Capua Vetere a development scenario in which the city becomes a tertiary metropolitan pole, pursuing a compact city model through the definition of a provincial ecological network that develops at the local scale into a capillary pattern of open spaces of various sizes. This paper delves into Santa Maria’s planning journey, highlighting its potential for resilienceUrban resilience and functional self-sufficiencySelf-sufficiency, despite ongoing developmental hurdles: the contribution describes various research activities in which the definition of a sustainable and smart approach arise through planningEcological planning application.