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This book draws on a wide range of conceptual and empirical materials to identify and examine planning and policy approaches that move beyond the imperative of perpetual economic growth. It sketches out a path towards planning theories and practices that can break the cyclical process of urban expansion, crises, and recovery that negatively affect ecosystems and human lives.To reduce the dramatic social and environmental impact of urbanization, this book offers both a critique of growth-led urban development and a prefiguration of ecologically regenerative and socially just ways of organizing cities and regions. It uncovers emerging possibilities for post-growth planning in the fields of collective housing, mobility, urban commoning, ecological land-use, urban–rural symbiosis, and alternative planning worldviews. It provides a toolkit of concepts and real-life examples for urban scholars, urbanists, activists, architects, and designers seeking to make cities prosper within planetary boundaries.This book speaks to both experts and beginners in post-growth thinking. It concludes with a manifesto and glossary of key terms for urban scholars, students, and practitioners.

In contemporary modern societies economic growth is strongly correlated with mobility growth, and mobility growth is strongly correlated with unsustainable environmental and social impacts. The sustainable mobility approach has attempted to weaken both these links by trying on one side to make economic growth less dependent on mobility growth, and on the other side to make mobility less environmentally and socially harmful. However, and despite 30 years of efforts, the success of this balancing act has been at best mixed and is plainly insufficient. This chapter argues that it is time to try an altogether different approach, and question instead the link between mobility growth and human welfare and well-being. The chapter sees the current pandemic as triggering a unique natural experiment allowing this exploration and asks what insights it might give about a world where increases of individual well-being are independent of mobility growth.

With their eyes set on a post-growth world, planners and policymakers, people and organisations shall promote: Approaches to dwelling that cease being environmentally destructive and sources of lifelong financial debt for isolated individuals and fragmented communities; Integrated approaches to transport, land use, and patterns of activity in which mobility ceases to be provided by environmentally destructive machines that constrain human beings and predetermine what or whom they need or aspire to reach; Approaches to urban governance that cease to fetishise private property as an inevitable right and are no longer dominated by standardised State bureaucracies; Planning regulations that cease to facilitate land development and ever-increasing land values as the key solutions to urban problems; Urban metabolisms that cease to be ravenous recipients of resources and predatory fabricators of carbon emissions, pollution, and waste; A societal ethic no longer dominated by competitive collaboration and individualism, extractivism and anthropocentrism.

A form of housing commons that is maintained through dispersed and disputable property rights. Commoning is a political practice of keeping housing out of the speculative real-estate market, which leads to the over accumulation of properties. It involves a community of dwellers collectivizing property. Together, they manage, own, and organize the estate on which they live by way of intense democratic engagement and solidarity. In current growth-dependent economies, the challenge facing autonomous housing is that of maintaining autonomy against the constant threats of state co-optation, commodification, and internal enclaving. The dispersal and disputability of property rights is a condition for the protection of housing commons against these risks. Being skills are the capacities and attitudes of planners that make planning action possible. Planning has long been associated with managing urban growth and associated urban development. The concept of the rural/urban divide illuminates a certain disconnection between urban and rural livelihoods in terms of economic, social, cultural, and political realities.

The viability of existing planning instruments is dependent on the maintenance of ceaseless urban economic growth. This dependency is deeply established in the historical roots of planning and has eroded the capacity of planners to address the challenges of socio-ecological justice we face today. How can planning be emancipated from the alleged imperative of growth? Which approaches and toolkits can planners mobilise to promote a mode of urban development that is geared to well-being, equality, and ecological equilibrium? With the ultimate goal of contributing to answering these questions, this introduction critically explores the main challenges of, and some possible pathways towards, a post-growth planning theory and practice. It presents some fundamental insights of post-growth thinking; and reflects on the key areas in which these insights can be actively used by planners: housing, transport and mobility, governance, regulations, food and resource provision, and planning worldviews and ethics. These areas organise the structure of this book.

From a degrowth perspective, housing is not a commodity but an essential social good. Through commoning, housing creates spaces of living with physical, social and ecological dimensions that are free from market competition. Yet, in current economic systems, housing commons are permanently threatened by market co-optation or marginalisation. Under these conditions, the issue of how autonomy in housing provision can be maintained becomes crucial. The chapter addresses this challenge by exploring the institutional architecture of a housing cooperative built upon degrowth ideals. It develops an analytical compass of four rights, which underlie a collective, self-managed and democratic way of life: commissioning, management, inclusion and income rights. Even though these rights can be configured in any housing tenure or form, we contend that they institute autonomous housing only when they are ‘collectivised’ – that is, when the property regime is dispersed and disputable. We show how these rights are articulated in practice by looking at a concrete case of a housing cooperative in Amsterdam: de Nieuwe Meent.

Existing road and railway system often incorporate bridges, part of the historical heritage, that need careful attention not only for their operational safety and safeguard. For this reason, the approach to the inspection and to the constructional knowledge require the integration and coordination of phases like the analysis of primary sources to in-situ characterization of local and global performance of components and materials. The management of infrastructures has to exploit digital technologies, both in the data collection phase and in the decision-making process. The paper deals with the e-conservation paradigm and discusses the results of an investigation on the potentialities offered by parametric models of historic bridges. It also checks and validates the introduction of the approach advised by recent National regulations in the framework of the Historic Bridge Information Modelling (HBrIM) combining safety and conservation knowledge instances.

The Authors would like to make an elucidation regarding the statement that High Pressure Processing (HPP) resulted inversely associated with aw of salami at the end of seasoning present in the manuscript “Update on a model to describe Salmonella spp. population reduction in Italian salami during production and high-pressure processing”. In this update, which describes a more precise model for Salmonella spp. decay in salami production, two sentences could be misunderstood given one sentence, referring to our previous work, stated that “HPP showed to further reduce the Salmonella spp. count with an efficacy that resulted inversely associated with aw of salami at the end of seasoning”, and a second sentence affirmed that “HPP efficacy was inversely associated with aw at the end of seasoning”. The Authors consider necessary to draw the readership's attention in order to remove any possible doubt about the findings of this study, namely that HPP efficacy is directly associated with aw values of salami and that, therefore, the HPP efficacy is inversely associated with the decay of aw observed in salami at the end of seasoning. In fact, as stated in the paper “the results of the new tests confirmed that Salmonella spp. Log colony forming units/g reduction was associated with [….] aw at the end of the seasoning period”.

Alkaline electrolyzed water (REW) is known for its cleaning action. The aim of this work was to assess REW effectiveness in reducing microbial load on surfaces intended for contact with food. Stainlesssteel surfaces were experimentally contaminated, bacterial inactivation was tested before and after treatment with REW. Treatment with REW was operated spraying it on the contaminated plates until drying. Tests were conducted for Salmonella spp., Listeria spp., Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli. The treatment revealed different degrees of sanitizing activity of REW on different bacterial species, with higher efficacy on E. coli and Salmonella spp. than S. aureus, Listeria spp.. Statistical analysis revealed a significant microbial load reduction (p

The architectural heritage is subject matter of several scholars, whose approach depends upon the cultural and technical background, with the same objective of increasing its comprehension in order to protect and enhance it. A concurrent effort like this points out the need of a common and shared language and method to exchange data and knowledge. Digital models enriched by semantic engines are able to correlate several disciplines, facilitating data management and exchange for a real interoperability encouraging novel process of documentation and fruition of historical heritage. In this paper, an approach to the problem is discussed with reference to specific architectural elements, the historical portals. The key phases of an operational procedure are illustrated. They move from traditional approaches used in the field of buildings archaeology and architecture towards the implementation of parameterized architectural elements to be used in a Historical Building Information Model (HBIM). Moreover, an Integrated Information System of 3D architectural elements (3DIIS), in a virtual environment is presented, which respond to the needs of several disciplines. This Virtual Reality (VR) system, through open-access tools, guarantees the topological connection of the data to the digital model for sharing and the diffusion of the knowledge. An Augmented Reality (AR) application designed for mobile devices can achieve a twofold objective: i) support the digital management and preservation of the architectural assets by entrusted authorities ii) empower the memory of the sites and valorisation of historical heritage in Inner Areas.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.26.2021.9

The present report shows the results of a study conducted between February 2019 and June 2019 on the construction and demolition waste market (CDW) in The Netherlands. The study had the objective to dissect the key features of the CDW sector, in terms of policies, governance, volumes and challenges. It aimed at understanding the key research and policy challenges for the reorganization of the waste sector in order to comply with the key ambitions of the circular econ-omy. In this study, the notion of circular economy is defined as the process of overall reduction of waste through the increase of its reuse as close as possible to its point of source. While recycling and secondary materials production re-mains core part of any circular economy strategy, we see the geographical factors crucial to facilitate the upscaling and repurposing of discarded materials within city-regional economies.