Repairing Landscapes toward the Regeneration of Periurban Ecologies. A Living Lab process in the South of Italy

This paper defines contemporary metropolitan areas as landscapes in transition towards sustainability, showing a regenerative potential based on their own natural, aesthetic, social, eco-systemic characteristics. This is connected to forms of landscape regeneration, taking into account different structures: spatial features, economic forces, but also communities’ perceptions and imaginaries. This paper unpacks this general question by making reference to some experimentations in the Campania Region in the South of Italy, and by investigating the ecological dimension within an Urban Metabolism approach and through a Living Labs methodology, to achieve communities’ and institutional engagement in the co-creation of knowledge and regeneration strategies. In the Horizon 2020 project ‘REPAiR. Resource Management in Peri-Urban Areas. Going beyond urban metabolism’, the research unit of the University of Naples Federico II worked on these landscapes, collaboratively building eco-innovative solutions and strategies with the involvement of local communities and all interested stakeholders for the systemic reuse of post-construction and organic waste for the reactivation of wastescapes. These visions have been developed in a multi-actor environment, following the Urban Living Lab methodology, an inclusive process to handle complex issues at multi-scale levels. In 2019, during the timeframe of the REPAiR project, Campania Regional Authority started the development of the Regional Landscape Plan, with the scientific consultancy from the Univer- sity of Naples Federico II. This coincided with the development of a framework of baseline knowledge on regional landscapes, with a specific focus on their most vulnerable components and most risk-exposed territories. Here, the mapping of periurbanisation and wastescapes on a regional level becomes the intersection between physiographic components on a spatial level and local meaning and hidden resources, based on data collected within co-creation activities. In coherence with the European Landscape Convention (2000), in the Regional Landscape Plan fragile landscapes must be identified through field research by professionals, but working in a strong interaction with local communities, within a planning process aimed at the regeneration of compromised areas and the design of landscapes, also with specific preservation and valorisation interventions. This paper focuses on the co-creation processes implemented within the methodological framework of Urban Living Labs, through which these visions to regenerate landscapes for public use are collaboratively imagined, designed and then effectively realized. The field of action is twofold: on the one hand, it regards Urban Metabolism, as the methodological approach that can reimagine the ecological question in periurban areas but in a systemic way, also incorporating the social and spatial dimensions; on the other hand, the paper is focused on co-creation activities, as methodological tools to achieve communities and institutional engagement, while co-creating place-based services, including ‘eco-systems services’ as in the case of the recovery of degraded landscapes. The paper sections pose the question of how to deal with landscapes to be ecologically repaired not only through interventions on the spatial dimension, but also simultaneously acting on the plurality of society imaginaries within place-based collaborative processes carried out in the Living Labs. The methodology of Urban Living Labs is then explored, with reference to the case study developed in the Horizon 2020 project REPAiR. Main findings of the application of this methodology in the landscapes to be repaired are mentioned in the Results section. Future perspectives and agenda (section Discussion and conclusion) refer to the further implementation of REPAiR methodology (both in terms of spatial analysis and co-creation activities) within the in-progress landscape planning.