The challenge to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, and resilient, including mitigation and adaptation strategies against disaster, is a central issue in achieving sustainability. This research proposes a tool to measure local vulnerability from a multi-risk approach. The municipality of Moncalieri, Italy, was used as a case study within the research activities of the Responsible Risk Resilience Centre from the Polytechnic of Turin to test the vulnerability matrix. The tool consists of a mathematical framework for the territorial vulnerability assessment that integrates multiple indicators clustered into three factors defined as sensitivity, pressures, and hazards, weighted according to a participatory procedure. Space-dependent analyses using the Geographical Information System were developed from the multiple nested indicators to project the vulnerability index onto a homogeneous grid in the territory of interest. Thematic maps referring to the systemic vulnerability by different sensitivity components were generated. The tool not only contributes to increasing the awareness of territorial vulnerability but also offers support to resilience-based decision-making in designing technical measures of policies at a local scale. Further research is required to implement the framework in different scenarios and develop the model's temporal behaviour.

The concept of resilience has arisen as a “new way of thinking”. It was applied in planning at the end of the last century as a concept that encourages policies to face stress factors and react by renewing and innovating cities. Resilience becomes instrumental in addressing both causes and effects of significant global challenges. As it motivates the transformative potentials of cities, resilience is commonly named “co-evolutionary resilience” [1] or, most recently, “transformative resilience” [2]. Following this more profound meaning, resilience is not only the opposite of vulnerability [3] but also a “broad concept”, whose final purpose is to prevent and manage unforeseen events together with the improvement of the environmental and social quality of a territorial system [4]. In a nutshell, this approach characterises resilience as a territorial systems’ capacity to respond systemically and dynamically to the present and future shocks related to significant global challenges through non-linear transformation processes. [...]

Energetic resilience is seen as one of the most prominent fields of investigation in the upcoming years. The increasing efficiency of urban systems depends on the conversion of energetic production of buildings, and therefore, from the capacity of urban systems to be more rational in the use of renewable resources. Nevertheless, the integration of the energetic regulation into the ordinary urban planning documents is far from being reached in most of planning processes. In Italy, mainstreaming energetic resilience in ordinary land use planning appears particularly challenging, even in those Local Administrations that tried to implement the national legislation into Local Building Regulation. In this work, an empirical methodology to provide an overall assessment of the solar production capacity has been applied to selected indicators of urban morphology among the different land use parcel-zones, while implementing a geographic information system-based approach to the city of Moncalieri, Turin (Italy). Results demonstrate that, without exception, the current minimum energy levels required by law are generally much lower than the effective potential solar energy production that each land use parcel-zone could effectively produce. We concluded that local planning processes should update their land use plans to reach environmental sustainability targets, while at the same time the energetic resilience should be mainstreamed in urban planning by an in-depth analysis of the effective morphological constraints. These aspects may also represent a contribution to the international debates on energetic resilience and on the progressive inclusion of energy subjects in the land use planning process.

The international debate on resilience has grown around the ability of a community to prepare for and adapt to natural disasters, with a growing interest in holistically understanding complex systems. Although the concept of resilience has been investigated from different perspectives, the lack of understanding of its conceptual comprehensive aspects presents strong limitations for spatial planning and for the adoption of policies and programs for its measurement and achievement. In this paper, we refer to "territorial resilience" as an emerging concept capable of aiding the decision-making process of identifying vulnerabilities and improving the transformation of socio-ecological and technological systems (SETSs). Here, we explore the epistemology of resilience, reviewing the origins and the evolution of this term, providing evidence on how this conceptual umbrella is used by different disciplines to tackle problem-solving that arises from disaster management and command-control practices to augment the robustness. Assuming the SETSs paradigm, the seismic and structural engineering, social sciences and history, urban planning and climatology perspectives intersects providing different analytical levels of resilience, including vulnerability and patrimony from a community and cultural perspective. We conclude that territorial resilience surpasses the analytical barriers between different disciplines, providing a useful concept related to complex problem-solving phenomena for land use planning, opening a new research question: how can territorial resilience be measured, acknowledging different units and levels of analysis aiding decision-making in spatial plans and projects? In attempting to understand a resilient system, quantitative and qualitative measurements are crucial to supporting planning decisions.