SMC Special Issue N.02 2019 | FOREWORD

The subjects of urban regeneration, health, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability are strongly linked to each others’ and they represent a great challenge that cities around the world have to face in the latest years. The experience made in the field of transition towards environmental and social sustainability has brought out quite clearly the importance of local dimension. In fact, every sustainable solution is acceptable, if it is effective also at local level. The latest considered, the recovery of buildings and urban spaces can be done using solutions of technological retrofit which tend to change the buildings’ originally intended use. These elements today represent one of the tools cities have to use so as to reinvigorate the social fabrics of their territory while at the same time stimulating new interactions that generate innovative solutions responding to the multiple challenges they face.
Following this logic, even iconic locations that have not been used for long periods can be transformed or at least starting again to be active part of an urban ecosystem aimed at stimulating the contamination between different sectors, such as the projectuality, the economy or the urban social sphere. The rebirth of these places can also generate new connections between organized groups of citizens that are able to express their needs through organized, stable and inclusive actions. […]