The usefulness and new requirements of urban planning and urban design for architecture and cities

The objective of the paper is to restore legitimacy to urban and planning project in urban transformations. The debate around the usefulness/utility of the urban plan has deep roots, especially in countries where highly regulatory urban planning instruments tied to outdated standards are in place (Campos Venuti, 1993). The paper investigates how useful the plan/project is at a historical moment of “transition”, when environmental priorities encourage rethinking urban planning actions. In Italy, many elements of innovation are contained in regional legislation and concern some important aspects of territorial-urban planning and urban design: (i) attention to the environment, the themes of zero land consumption, defense against risk, conservation of ecosystem services; (ii) the speed of responses to change, thus ways to intercept the dynamics of phenomena (today the use of digital twins, of AI for modeling, can be useful, although not prescribed); (iii) environmental assessment as it constitutes the tool for controlling urban and territorial transformations. In recent decades, however, we are witnessing an anomalous situation: while regulations have driven some sustainable urban transformations in the most virtuous cities, we are witnessing the production of much philosophy and few “useful” plans. The narrative approach has opened incredible fault lines, leaving technical questions unresolved. Real urbanism-design and planning-is no longer liked because it fails to provide quick answers to changing social questions. The urbanism of “norms” is too complex for some, unknown for others. This structural weakness has fueled the belief that urban planning tools are obsolete, useless and derogable. About the need to speed up the implementation of urban planning tools there is a widespread belief. But that this cannot be a pretext for legitimizing urban planning deregulation. There are those who argue that in order to rise to the role of competitive and attractive cities, extremely complex realities like Milano can pander to economic drives while ignoring social and environmental issues (Campos Venuti, 1993). The city have strong contradictions: it is a hypertrophic system focused on real estate rent where there is little attention to services, communities and individuals. Instead of reducing the gap by 524 ISARC academy INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE AND ART RESEARCH CENTER improving accessibility, the right to live in the city and access to services, and the welfare system with policies and measures to support workers, students, and families, the social divide has been exacerbated by yielding to logics related only to increasing the supply of real estate. The real strong innovation in the way of planning must be the adaptation of techniques to the epistemological innovation of planning and a closer integration of analysis and plan in respect of ethical roots.