Interethnic and Resilient Cities: Urban planning in Italy

Nowadays, the phenomenon of social exclusion is growing up, especially in the middlegreat cities. Private affairs are acquiring a greater and greater control over the choices and the projects connected to urban transformations and, at the same time, they are ignoring the collective needs. The binomial private-collective affairs risks to weaken the resiliency of the cities, in other words it risks to weaken the ability of the urban system to react to the changes in a positive way. Since the urban system is complex, the preponderance of the profit-oriented logic weakens those components that should aim to reconstruct a new and effective balance. As known, the urban plan (UP) depends on the normative choices and on the political-administrative decisions. According to this, the UP – that does not have empowerment – is not a tool that can engrave on the resiliency of the city by itself, by increasing the capacity of structuring fair and sympathetic urban systems. Since the UP is merely a tool of technical support to the political project, it is clear that the role that it can play for the realization of a resilient city strictly depends on the policy choices (about integration or expulsion, assimilation or exclusion, hybridization, solidarity, marginalization, and citizenship, etc.). In reference to the Italian context, the paper investigates if and how the UP can provide effective responses to the needs of the most vulnerable citizens and, in particular, of the immigrants’ urban life. The UP defines, in fact, the articulation of the "adapted space", which must set the conditions through which each need can be expressed and satisfied, through which a suitable offer corresponds to the social demand, not only in quantitative terms but also in symbolic, aesthetic, semantic and identity terms. Therefore, the paper explores how public spaces can be structured and organized so that even "other" cultures can identify and acquire new shared identities and how different interests that often conflict between them (as, for example, between market and welfare) can be mediated. In the end, the paper tries to figure out whether and how the UP can make a contribution to the solution of conflicts between the above contrasting interests. The last research question deals with the tools that can support the act of planning or of developing (decision support – participatory processes) since they can let us understand if they can be effectively implemented, ensuring the contribution of the weaker members and the fulfilment of their needs.