Eco-Innovative Solutions for Wasted Landscapes

This paper explores the paradigm of circularity as an innovative approach for planning, stressing out the complexity of urban systems and working on the interactions between in-bound and out-bound flows. Therefore, the study looks at circularity as a concept addressing at multi-scaling design method, and at innovative models for designing products, processes, and projects. Notably, the concept of eco-innovation is here used to explain the design potentials, when extended to the environment according to the EU definition as «Eco-innovation refers to all forms of innovation – technological and non-technological – that create business opportunities and benefit for the environment by preventing or reducing their impact, or by optimizing the use of resources» (EC, 2012). Within the Horizon 2020-REPAiR partnership, the Italian Research Unit (Department of Architecture of Naples of the University of Naples Federico II) focused on the territorial dimension of waste management and specifically on Wasted Landscapes as a scrap product of the urban metabolism. Further, the research interest is given to the peri-urban areas, where waste flows management follows a sectorial, un-efficient approach, running without a comprehensive, territorial strategy by administrators and without any of inhabitants’ awareness. This paper illustrates the first advances of the Italian Research Team, in applying a cross-cutting analysis of the study area by the aim of providing a scientific based description of peri-urban areas. The analysis is oriented to collect quantitative and qualitative data, as well as data for the spatial analysis, for representing, understanding and improving the relationship between the detection of peri-urban area borders and the current urban metabolism of waste flows.