- Visioning Scenarios for the ’Urban Eco-Region Project’    285 kb by    Besio, Mariolina | besio@arch.unige.it    Short Outline This paper will elaborate scenarios to guide the strategic project of the “urban eco-region”. The scenarios prefigure a renewed “alliance between city and country” and a new “urbanness” for the inhabitants’ community. Abstract VISIONING SCENARIOS FOR THE “URBAN ECO-REGION” PROJECT Mariolina Besio Abstract With visioning techniques and methods, scenarios have been elaborated to guide a strategic project for new forms of living between city and countryside which are becoming widespread in many Italian and European regions. The new “urban phenomenon” extends the city into space that was once the countryside, expanding into territories of “urban regions” and “green tourism”. The rural landscape does not change greatly, but behaviour and life-styles of inhabitands do as they change from farmers to city dwellers. The phenomenon is pervasive and magmatic and is spreading in a capillary and spontaneous fashion, leading to not insignificant risks. The individualisation push produces a lack of collective vision; it shatters community ties and does not recognise environmental and landscape values as public goods. The scenarios propose a vision of the strategic project of “urban eco-region” which refers to eco-system and evolutionary paradigms and uses image techniques and elaboration. The project involves a renewed “alliance between city and country” and the assertion of new types of “urbanness” that weave community relations between inhabitants. In fact, the visions proposed by the scenarios supply the structure of reference to integrate settlement projects with those for safeguarding the environment and landscape conservation. These, moreover, guide a process in which new inhabitants have the opportunity to directly participate in projects that affect their lives and to be consciously responsible for their quality. The “urban eco-region” scenarios have been produced in the context of research of national interest, financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research; they were experimented in case-studies of rural spaces surrounding Genoa and La Spezia and those with a high tourism disposition in the Cinque Terre, on the central and eastern Ligurian coast. Keywords A NEW VISION FOR ''URBAN ECO-REGION'' Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper