Italy Planning seismic Inner Areas in Central Italy. Experimental application for the infrastructural project, lifeline and resilient public space in the shrinking territory

Natural calamities that repeatedly hit the Country, ranging from earthquake to climate change induced events – like landslides and floods – resulted in huge damages, worsened by the infrastructural degrade and by the abandonment of some territories, especially in the inner areas of the Country. There is therefore a pressing need to improve the infrastructural resiliency, focusing on extraordinary manutention, on the technological development of the monitoring activities and of the supporting infrastructure, on the prevention, the civil protection and the public aid. Resilience nonetheless, is a much wider concept, as it was made dramatically evident by the current pandemic crisis. This includes, for example, the capability of the urban system to respond to unexpected seismic events or health issues; the solidity of the public space fabric, of services and strategic program supporting communities needed to promptly and efficiently respond to sudden crisis. This paradigm, limited to municipal administrative boundaries, results in an increased fragmentation of the territorial safety project, where the connection between infrastructural networks at the regional scale is not always achieved. Peripheral urban contexts of the Inner Areas are exposed to “isolation Risks” in case of catastrophic events, as witnessed after the 2016 seismic events, where secondary infrastructure network was heavily affected, bringing great problems for those living in the areas. The paper explores experimental methodologies to bring substantial modifications to the villages and minor urban areas structure (for the damaged buildings as for the infrastructural network) that the reconstruction makes possible, making of it a unique occasion to renew and reorganise the territory.