Smart Districts, Smart Landscapes?

This chapter addresses some of the basic concepts on which sustainable strategies of urban planning can be built. Available resources for the development of the city should be organized to meet the requirement of sustainability at local and territorial scale. This property should not neglect the capacity of resilience. They both constitute a useful framework for understanding the emerging urban system and characterizing the relationships between conservation, community and institutions. The innovative element is the attribute of smart, which has to envisage several dimensions of the urban governance in a territorial dimension that includes city-land-districts. This perspective attributes a crucial role to the landscape, as instrument of urban planning, given the above socio-environmental challenge. In this context, the adoption of a territorial foresight approach results as fundamental for a successful organization of resources at the territorial level exploiting both the potential of technological advances and cultural local identity for city development.