Urban regeneration for urban health

For some years now when attempting to regenerate the urban fabric of big cities, the field of environmental design has been tackling the challenges posed by ongoing climate change, extreme poverty, social marginalisation and health problems, where these are neither occasional nor residual situations that arise as part of development processes but emerge as social diseases with deep-rooted characteristics in places that are already under significant man-made pressure, a type of pressure that causes serious environmental problems (air and water pollution, urban heat islands, increasing temperatures) and social problems (criminality, drug addiction, mental illness and nutritional disorders). With the lack of radical policies designed to foster inclusion, the growth of areas characterised by marginalisation and extreme poverty in cities is affecting these districts, creating what are to all intents and purposes mono-social and mono-cultural enclaves that lack services and where we constantly witness the gradual exclusion of residents from public spaces. The urban metropolis of Rome is afflicted by significant spatial segregation, and the residential area examined in this study, known as the former Bastogi housing estate, is undoubtedly particularly suited to the application of experimental design approaches, given the complexity of the relationships that form there between the consolidated built environment, health problems, social problems and urban poverty.