Bruno Zanon

• University of Trento

"The progress of the practice and the debate on architecture in the Alpine region of Trentino, in the last fifty years, has been characterised by a pivotal role of the Autonomous Province, the local authority with key competencies in environmental matters and spatial organisation, on the one hand, and by the experimentation and the promotion of dis...

The article addresses the issue of social perception of landscape change connected to energy production from renewables, in an Alpine area. The Alpine regions have undergone extensive transformations in the last century, and energy has played a key role in socio-economic phenomena and in landscape change, because of the availability of oil products...

Urban spatial development is a crucial issue for spatial planning and urban governance, ultimately determining cities’ sustainability. While a set of spatial strategies to address urban development are progressively gaining international consensus, their actual applicability is still contested. An interesting test-bed is represented by the European...

A rapid change has traversed local territories, which have been involved in globalization dynamics, in supra-local connections, and in wider processes of governance rescaling. These latter have implied the shift of competencies from national states to the European Union, on the one hand, and to regional authorities on the other; from the public dom...

Recurrent attention has been paid to regional disparities, and specific European, national and regional policies have been activated to reduce differences. In this framework, mountainous regions are usually considered 'peripheral areas' per se, but in the Alps a variety of conditions coexist because of the presence of many urban centres and innovat...

The rapid change occurring in the economy, spatial organization, as well as institutional systems, affects states and regions, which must face crucial re-territorialization processes. In particular, European integration has produced a shrinkage of the European space and had important consequences in various fields, most of them with a spatial dimen...

The article focuses on the relationships between social networks and spatial organization in view of the activation of local development in ‘fragile areas', which are territories characterized by geographical, economic and social weaknesses. Territory is considered in its multidimensional complexity in regard to natural and human-made features, phe...

Planners' technical expertise has evolved from architectural-engineering bases to include socio-economic and environmental issues, as well as communication methods and participatory procedures. This progress challenges professional practices and educational programmes, and produces a looser image of the planner, in contrast with that of engineers a...

In Italy, recent University reforms, a research quality assessment exercise, and the selection of academics by means of innovative procedures are all accelerating the discussion on the specificity of research on spatial planning and urban design. One first step was a discussion on the quality of the journals in which planners and urban designers cu...

Climate change and energy saving are challenging the city and the territorial organization. Innovative spatial and urban planning methods and procedures are required, and new approaches and instruments must be elaborated and applied in order to shift from the building scale to the urban and territorial ones. In fact, while energy saving and emissio...

The process of territorial governance rescaling now ongoing in European countries concerns not only the devolution of competencies from central states to regional politico-administrative levels (towards federalism) but also a new role of institutions, agencies and companies operating in well defined sectors. A complex – downward and upward – transf...

Assessment of research products is a crucial issue for universities and research institutions faced with internationalization and competition. Disciplines are reacting differently to this challenge, and planning, in its various forms – from urban design to process-oriented sectors – is under strain because the increasingly common assessment procedu...

Nature conservation policies and procedures have recently acquired a wider mission. Disciplinary advances, the approval of international guidelines and regulations, and the increasing number and variety of protected areas require to overcome the traditional rigid separation between designated areas and the rest of the territory. In particular, the...

Infrastructure networks play a crucial role in the construction of the territory because they create connections among places and define spatial systems in physical and economic as well as political terms. The development of mobility networks activate the re-definition of the constituting relations of territories (de-territorialization and re-terri...

An enlarged Europe is addressing the challenge of territorial cohesion on the basis of a disciplinary and operative framework formed by a number of evolving documents and provisions to be applied and developed at different administrative and planning levels. Rapid and profound changes have occurred in previous decades as far as institutional framew...

This paper provides an overview of the initiatives for sustainable development taking place in Italy at the urban and provincial levels, stressing some limits they met: unsatisfactory knowledge of environmental conditions, use of too general indicators, modest public participation. The case of the plan for the Province of Trento, currently in progr...

River basin planning has recently been established in Italy as a tool of water resource and environmental management. River basin planning must tackle, in co-ordination with land use planning, the wide range of problems related to water use and risk control. The European scope of these problems is considered and the innovations which have taken pla...

The model presented needs to be improved expecially as far as computing time is concerned. The problems dealt with DOT require usually a large number of decision variables to be realistic, but no efficient optimisation technique is available for 0–1 linear programming with a large number of variables.