Sustainable Strategies in Mobility Planning towards Resilient Cities

Making cities resilient is one of the main pillars of the 11th goal in UN Agenda 2030 and has become a convergent theme in urban contemporary policies at global level. "Urban Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience” (Rockefeller Foundation, ‘100 Resilient Cities’ initiative). Unfortunately, when a term is so successful to permeate the common lexicon, it runs the risk of becoming trivial if not correctly interpreted through specific theoretical and operational coordinates. The polysemic nature of the term "resilience" in urban policies is enabling more and more innovative multi-disciplinary entanglement, implementing virtuous dialogue between several knowledge domains (health, eco-environment, socio-economy, geography, planning) and fertile blending between top-down and bottom-up practices. The unprecedented global challenge of Covid-19 has greatly emphasised the critical condition of cities already facing the harmful effects of climate change and urban inequalities: issues like physical discontinuity, poor accessibility, lack of public spaces, and scarce access to common goods, increasingly stress the need for an authentically 'holistic' approach to urban resilience (UNISDR, 2012). In the context of the post-pandemic recovery policies, launched in 2020-21 through the allocation of huge public resources at international level (e.g. the USA ‘American Jobs Plan’ or the ‘Next Generation EU’), the emphasis on the resilience concept is clearly emerging (Italian ‘National Recovery and Resilience Plan’, 2021). In the official documents, among the various interpretative keys, it is clearly highlighted the role of urban and metropolitan areas as privileged innovation target as well as the potential of mobility networks as strategic vector for the implementation of cohesion principles of territories and civic communities. Looking at the ‘space of movement’, new planning tools can overcome ancient separations with land use design and open space system by concretely implementing integrated regeneration strategies. In this sense, the EU SUMP (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan) - officially introduced through the ‘Mobility Urban Package’ [(COM 2013) 913] and progressively implemented by the 27 member states - represents the ambition of combining mobility and transport infrastructures with the urban space design. Within two research projects (EU H2020 and ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome funds), the main goal of this paper is to investigate and highlight innovative approaches in European SUMP, aimed at overcoming the sectoral critical aspects within an urban and metropolitan resilience perspective. Looking at the emerging interpretative trends of the new generation of Sustainable Mobility Plans it is possible to focus different cultural models and styles through comparative case-study analysis. The research adopts the inductive method and the classic case-study interpretation keys (Yin 1984) developed with a qualitative approach and supported by direct sources and interviews. Findings and lessons are expected to be useful in order to extract relevant suggestions for the specific interpretation styles of resilience in planned strategies and specific projects, notably in the European context. Virtuous experiences in France, Spain and northern Europe are expected to deliver significant results and references useful for introducing innovation in policies and planning practices in the Italian context. As to this purpose, the integrated and inclusive planning process in the metropolitan area of Bologna appears particularly advanced due to its consistency with the holistic approach promoted in European policies. Its recent planning path shows the integration of mobility networks, public transportation systems, dense urban patterns, green-blue corridors and public spaces to be planned through participatory democracy’s steps.