Resilience between Mitigation and Adaptation

The climatic, environmental and anthropic changes that characterize the beginning of this millennium increasingly are a major subject in the international debate since they influence, on the one hand, the protection of territories, landscapes and fragile urban areas, and on the other, the uses, performance and efficiency of architectural artefacts and everyday objects. Moreover, the shortage of natural resources, the global economic crisis, the mass migratory flows and the unpredictability of seismic events, are a source of continuous instability which can be dealt only with ‘resilient thoughts’ capable of answering continuous or sudden changes. In general, Resilience is considered as «[…] the property of complex systems to respond to stress events, activating response and adaptation strategies in order to restore functioning mechanisms: resilient systems, facing stressful events, react by renewing themselves but maintaining the functionality and the recognizability of their systems» (Gunderson and holling, 2002). Within a positive dynamic process, aimed at managing events and rebuilding a new (landscape, urban, architectural, economic, social, etc.) balance, resilience does not imply the restoration of an initial state, but the acquisition of a new balance and maintenance of functionality through two approach strategies. The first strategy is Adaptive, focused on the dynamic nature of operational methods – from ideational, compositional/design, to productive, realization, operational and management methods – in which all the elements of the built environment, from the territorial and urban scale, building, to the material and object scale, effectively adapt to new balances with higher performance levels. The second strategy is Mitigative, where research is directed to innovative technologies (process, project and product) aimed at risk prevention and minimizing any impact – concerning unsettling events due to environmental, seismic, anthropic and social change – and aiming at the realization of urban systems, buildings, objects, components and sensitive materials, with variable behaviour and in an energetic-dynamic equilibrium with climatic and environmental changes. In this regard, the book on Resilience between Mitigation and Adaptation collects essays and critical reflections, researches and experiments, projects and interventions referred, on interscale terms, to the different dimensions of the man-made and natural environment, to which risk, fragility and vulnerability can no longer be dealt with individually by the traditional tools of sustainability, innovation, redevelopment or regeneration, but only through a systemic approach capable of supporting, integrating and fostering relationships between individual, group and community, cultural and multi/transdisciplinary competences (urban planning, architecture, representation, history, restoration and recovery, technology, design and communication, economy, sociology, psychology, etc.) thus integrating humanistic and technical knowledge. More specifically, the main areas of interest concern: – Landscape and Territory Area, as cross-disciplinary synthesis of systemic and integrated knowledge of the Environment, in its natural aspects (natural and naturalized signs, natural network systems, etc.) and related to anthropic uses and transformations (networks and infrastructure, etc.): a resilient landscape policy must take into account, above all, the non-material interests and desires of the population, such as beauty, biological and landscape diversity, habitats, identification with the territory, etc.; – Urban Area: the quality of cities requires complex strategies, both for intervention scales (structural and process) and for fields of action (economic, environmental, social), to be continuously implemented over time and with respect of the characteristics of the contexts; the resilient city changes by designing innovative social, economic and environmental responses that allow cities to withstand (by changing) the demands of the environment and history in the long run; – Architecture and Building Field: to ensure a resilient approach, Architecture must absorb, on the one hand, the principle of adaptation (to contexts, to climate, to risks), and on the other the principle of limit/envelop (to be implemented increasing the permeability and going over the partitions), and finally the principle of reduction (intended as an essential tendency towards an increasingly stronger habit of saving natural resources and as a constant research on how to minimize/eliminate pollution and more generally climate-changing emissions at all stages of the life cycle: case studies and experimental creations, in this regard, represent a privileged key to interpretation);