EC2U publishes its first book

EC2U publishes its first book. Researchers from the 7 Partner Universities of the European Campus for City-Universities worked on the writing and publication of the book “Cities and Communities across Europe: governance design for a sustainable future”.

The book will be officially presented at the University of Salamanca in September, where the coordinator of the project, Professor Juan José Rastrollo Suarez, will present the project. The other authors will also be present, including Professor De Lotto, Professor of Urban planning in the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture of the University of Pavia.

The volume represents a unique contribution in its field, first of all because it is the result of joint research by scholars from various universities, and also because it contributes to the construction of a multidisciplinary concept of sustainability, from the point of view of the social sciences. In fact, various disciplines have been combined within the book, including: law, political science, economics, sociology, geography, all to build an idea of sustainability that can be embodied in the entire area of social sciences.

The design of the volume "Cities and Communities across Europe: governance design for a sustainable future", was born in the framework of the work package n.6 of the Alliance, "Sustainable Cities and Communities", coordinated in Pavia by Professor Marco Morandotti of the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, which is rooted in the same United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, (SDG n.11).

The book is available at this link

The volume will be presented during the "International talent week: Boost Your Career in a Multicultural Environment", which will take place in Salamanca (Spain) from 25 to 28 September 2023 and which will welcome PhD students and researchers from all the partner universities of the Alliance.

Below is a short excerpt from the volume:

Flexibility in urban planning: rules, opportunities and limits

Prof. Roberto De Lotto - University of Pavia, Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture

For several decades, the theory of complex systems has animated extensive research related to urban planning and urban studies in general. Among the various orientations that these works have informed, there is the "flexible" character of the city, with which the text deals. In developing the contribution, an attempt has been made to explicitly highlight how urban facts must be understood as the effect of an iterative and intrinsically complex process which envisages at least the following phases, which are not always consequential: 1) analytical phase: analysis and diagnosis of the components of the urban system; 2) decision-making phase: definition of the plan objectives deriving from the analyzes and/or defined by the political programme; 3) government phase: management of the city through the implementation of the plan or as a variation to it. Flexibility and sustainability are closely linked, as flexibility can be considered as a form of resilience attentive to small-magnitude changes that occur in the short and medium timescales, and not only those of great impact with very long return times. Furthermore, flexibility it originates from the organicist approach that several Italian urban planners (including Piccinato) have already explored and tried to translate into operational actions. The approach to flexibility presented in the text unfolds in three areas: the study of the city as a changing and adaptive object; the city government tool, the plan, understood as an open tool; the holistic approach to planning, which requires skills originating from both quantitative and qualitative sciences.