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This interdisciplinary quantitative study offers a comprehensive assessment of how visits to the Civil War shelters in Alicante, which have been rehabilitated and opened to the public, influence awareness of cultural memory heritage in an urban context. The framework of the FEDER Operational Program "Sustainable Growth 2014-2020", delves into how these spaces contribute both to sustainable urban de-velopment and to historical understanding in society. Through a retrospective longitudinal design, data from 407 visitors were collected and analyzed between August 2023 and January 2024, aiming to profile the visitors, their motivations, and their visitation patterns. Preliminary findings reveal a positive reception and an increase in awareness of the historical significance of the shelters, suggesting a substantial impact on the appreciation of memory heritage. The analysis provides key insights for managing cultural heritage by proposing enhanced strategies for the communication and promotion of historical legacy. This article is positioned at the intersection of tourism research and cultural heritage studies, exploring the links between culture, sustainable development and tourism through an inter- and transdisciplinary approach that encompasses both social sciences and administrative and business practices.

The current economic situation has highlighted the difficulties and fragility of some previous programmatic choices, which have strongly penalized Italian marginal areas. This has been further aggravated by the Ukrainian conflict and by the lengthening of the pandemic recession. Local planning has often proved to be unsustainable in the long-term due to its lack of global sustainability. Local projects are frequently developed and realized in situations of contingent needs, tight deadlines, and by below-strength staff, which do not allow for adequate and accurate overall planning. These difficulties have emerged and have particularly increased during the past year with the rising strain of responding promptly to the copious National and European funds released in support of the dual transition, established by the European Union. In this situation, it seems mandatory to support the marginal areas in their transition process and in their responsive and conscious participation in the allocated funding. The expectation is to finance projects with positive impacts and with long terms sustainable effects on the peripheral territories, increasing their competitiveness but mostly their socio-economic well- being. The aim of this study was to prioritize, through a multicriteria model, different projects in marginal areas according to their sustainability impact levels, in line with the European goals. This paper proposes an Absolute Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model through a targeted selection of Urban Sustainability Indicators (USIs) to define the degree of sustainability of different urban projects. and their ranking in accordance with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) Missions. By examining the efficiency of the allocation of funds in maximizing the expected quantitative-qualitative impacts on marginal areas, this study allows to verify policy objectives. This paper may support future models able of ranking a large scale of urban projects on their sustainability impacts in marginal regions. The definition of scales of priorities can therefore become a useful tool capable of assisting territories in applying awareness to funds for projects with high sustainable impacts. L’attuale congiuntura economica negativa, aggravata dal conflitto ucraino e dal protrarsi della recessione pandemica, ha fatto emergere le difficoltà e le fragilità di alcune scelte programmatiche del passato che hanno penalizzato le aree interne del paese. Spesso l’attuazione e la pianificazione locale si è rivelata non sostenibile nel lungo termine, evidenziando la criticità di alcune scelte a scapito della sostenibilità globale di sistema. Frequentemente gli interventi locali vengono attuati in situazioni di necessità contingenti, scadenze già sollecitate, ed organici sottodimensionati, che non permettono una corretta e adeguata indagine programmatica e d’insieme. Tali complessità sono emerse e si sono acuite particolarmente durante quest’ultimo anno, alla luce della difficoltà di rispondere pronta- mente e strutturalmente agli innumerevoli bandi emanati su fondi nazionali ed europei per attuare la transizione duale in accordo con le direttive e gli obiettivi stabiliti dall’unione Europea. Supportare le aree in- terne nel loro processo di transizione e quindi nella loro partecipazione responsiva e consapevole ai finanziamenti stanziati, assume, quindi, un ruolo rilevante e di grande responsabilità. L’auspicio è che gli innumerevoli finanziamenti vengano direzionati da parte dei territori periferici verso progetti di impatto e con ricadute sostenibili nel lungo periodo, incrementando, non solo la loro competitività, ma anche, attraverso la loro efficacia, il proprio benessere socioeconomico. Lo scopo del presente studio è quello di definire, attraverso l’applicazione di un modello multicriteri, la scala di priorità di diverse progettualità sulle aree interne secondo criteri di sostenibilità, in coerenza con i goals europei. Il presente contributo propone, attraverso la selezione mirata di indicatori della sostenibilità urbana (USIs), un modello Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) assoluto in grado di definire il grado di sostenibilità e quindi di priorità dei progetti in coerenza con le missioni del Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR). Tale analisi permette di verificare gli obiettivi di policy, esaminando l’efficacia della ripartizione dei fondi per una massimizzazione quanti-qualitativa degli impatti attesi sul territorio. Tale lavoro è il punto di partenza per la creazione di modelli in grado di offrire una classificazione della sostenibilità di molteplici interventi urbani da attuare sulle aree marginali. La creazione di scale di priorità può quindi diventare uno strumento in grado di assistere i territori nell’accedere ai finanziamenti con una programmazione consapevole di impatto sostenibile.

Many medium-sized Italian cities share the problem of having incorporated or having to integrate within the urban area relevant industrial components that influence both the overall quality of life and the environment in a strict sense. Sustainability perspectives are a relevant starting point for guiding companies’ development and growth strategies. At the same time, this aspect constitutes a strategic opportunity for urban development, that is still conditioned by the direct presence of companies that, in the best scenario, simply comply with current regulations in term of sustainability. The classic stakeholder theory, which is widely diffused in organizational culture, must be revised to solidify the understanding of the role of local stakeholders, who are passively involved in the environmental impact of companies’ activities. Studying the awareness, among the different corporate components, of environmental issues, is a very relevant step to trigger processes of effective improvement. In this article, we would like to argue that a greater understanding of sustainability issues on the part of decision-makers and employees of companies is a key that can have concrete effects on an aggregate level in the urban dimension. To verify this hypothesis, we propose a case study comparing three organisations, composed of ten plants spread across the Italian territory and all located in the proximity of medium-sized cities. Adopting a mixed qualitative-quantitative methodology, the work crosses primary qualitative data (semi-structured interviews with key players), quantitative data and secondary data relating to the territorial context. The results allow to highlight limits and potential of the industrial-urban coexistence, with a specific focus on the relation between private and public actors.

This paper focuses on the spaces of justice in the Roman world by considering their evolution during the Augustus’ Principate. The aim is to enhance a specific indicator attested in ancient literary sources to show up courts’ transformations, i.e. salubritas. The role of this requirement in those places in which trials were held will not be investigated from an environmental perspective, but within a reflection about urban comfort and sustainable infrastructures during the transition between Republic and Empire.

This research addresses the issue of process innovation for the transformation of the built environment aimed at carbon neutral objectives in urban space. The design experience is based on a game-based learning approach in which collaborative processes and digital technologies support the performance response of the project actions. The collected information is processed with the intention of configuring a digital serious game as an interactive space where citizen, designer and public administrators can understand and simulate urban transformation scenarios and seek shared solutions that can contain the local ecological footprint as close as possible to the sustainable limit.

Globally, one in two people living in cities, megacities are more than twenty, and both figures are expected to increase. In light of this scenario, the major challenge is the ability to grow the urban areas with efficiency and improving the quality of citizens’ life. In the city of the future, the environment, the people and the technology have to be devised in an integrated and sustainable way: this is what underlies the concept of the smart city.

In this article, we compare two databases, one providing mobility data for 34 European cities (UITP database), and the other database providing population density grid cells for these cities at 200m scale. Looking towards sustainable urban forms, we assess explanatory power of socio-economic and morphological indicators, with respect to seven mobility indicators, including the energy consumption per inhabitant due to transport (base year 2001). We conclude that classical urban indicators (GDP per inhabitant, population density) and more precise morphological indicators (entropy, rank-size slope) are complementary towards such objectives.

This paper is concerned with the impact and implications of gated communities on urban sustainability. This is investigated making use of an overarching methodological framework based on the internationally accepted Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) model, developed by the OECD. Additional to the simple causal flow from drivers to responses are the dynamic relationships between these five aspects. The paper discusses each of these issues and the relationships between them as they pertain to gated communities in South Africa. Gated communities, as complex systems, necessitate the consideration of a multiplicity of feedback loops with internal rates of flow that are determined by non-linear relationships. Only in this way can the full extent of their impact and implications on urban sustainability be assessed.

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the structural features and of the evolutionary trends of the city of Bari and its metropolitan area in order to identify its trajectories of development and to evaluate its competitiveness in the wider Euro-Mediterranean area. To this end, we analyzed the strategic areas of development which can promote the functional and cultural regeneration of the city and of its geographical area: Logistics, Culture, Industry, Research, Services, Tourism. The development of Bari and of its metropolitan area is related to the possibility of carrying out a development model which integrates various sectors, exploiting their interactive and synergistic links. Our analysis shows how the possibility for this perspective to be achieved closely lies on the processes of Euro-Mediterranean integration and on the city's ability to assume a central role in the dynamics of development of the "Adriatic-Ionian" Region. Bari should therefore aim at creating an integrated logistics system, supported by a coherent, innovative economic and productive context, but it should also propose itself as a center of convergence and diffusion of culture and creativity. The process of integration of these different elements can be achieved only through the implementation of innovative and effective models of governance which should be expression of a shared territorial planning aiming at improving the competitive position of the metropolitan area without neglecting the solution of those social and environmental issues which hindered its development until now and threaten to compromise its competitive position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no formalised theory of sustainable urban mobility systems. Observed patterns of urban mobility are often considered unsustainable. But we don’t know what a city with sustainable mobility should look like. It is nevertheless increasingly apparent that the urban mobility system plays an important role in the achievement of the city’s wider sustainability objectives.In this paper we explore the characteristics of sustainable urban mobility systems through the technique of Bayesian networks. At the frontier between multivariate statistics and artificial intelligence, Bayesian networks provide powerful models of causal knowledge in an uncertain context. Using data on urban structure, transportation offer, mobility demand, resource consumption and environmental externalities from seventy-five world cities, we developed a systemic model of the city-transportation-environment interaction in the form of a Bayesian network. The network could then be used to infer the features of the city with sustainable mobility.The Bayesian model indicates that the city with sustainable mobility is most probably a dense city with highly efficient transit and multimodal mobility. It produces high levels of accessibility without relying on a fast road network. The achievement of sustainability objectives for urban mobility is probably compatible with all socioeconomic contexts.By measuring the distance of world cities from the inferred sustainability profile, we finally derive a geography of sustainability for mobility systems. The cities closest to the sustainability profile are in Central Europe as well as in affluent countries of the Far East. Car-dependent American cities are the farthest from the desired sustainability profile.

There is an internationally shared agreement on the use of indicators for evaluating the sustainability of the observed patterns of urban development. The most commonly used framework to organise and select such indicators is the Pressures-State-Responses scheme. First proposed by the OECD to organise environmental indicators, its inadequacy is increasingly evident. The weaknesses of the conceptual frameworks currently used in urban sustainability analysis induced us to develop a more coherent theoretical framework in the form of a systemic scheme. The new scheme combines the causal approach of the Pressures-State-Responses model and the focus on urban sustainability issues of the extended urban metabolism model by Newman and Kenworthy. In this paper, the new scheme was used to derive a systemic framework for the assessment of the sustainability of urban mobility. First, we adapted the general scheme to the analysis of urban mobility. Successively, using the cognitive mapping software Decision Explorer, we further developed this scheme to obtain a more disaggregated conceptual model. A selection table could be derived for every element of the model to guide the selection of pertinent indicators based on the systemic links of the element. We could thus define a set of some sixty system indicators to be used in the assessment of the sustainability of urban mobility. The selected set of indicators reflects the causal links between phenomena and can monitor the attainment of sustainability objectives for the urban mobility system. All indicators allow geographical comparison and integrate the role played by different urban actors and modes of transportation. This work has been carried out within the first year of a joint PhD research program at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis and at the Polytechnic of Milan.

The research investigates the urban structure complexity through the application of the cognitive approach processed by Neural Networks. The aim is to identify urban profiles representing characteristics and organization levels of each considered urban systems. The paper presents two different contexts of analysis: the competition among European cities and the sustainability in the Italian urban system.