HEALTH AND WELFARE IN 2020: SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS IN REGIONAL MEGACITY

The city between 2020 healthy issues and 2030 SDGs
City and environment: today this link has substantially changed; there is no longer a clear and recognizable border, for citizenship is rearranged also according to the different richness brackets and access to culture, for the city and the country tend to be uniform – so as to create benefits for rural districts (or for small towns, which are usually at low social attractiveness) as well as to provide green lungs to more central urban areas (urban forests, agricultural gardens, etc.), and their structure turns out to be more fluid and flexible, in terms of both tangible aspects and participatory-cultural elements.
The new term for indicating the present aforesaid state of land around the world was coined by Peter Hall: ‘mega-city Regions’ are “… phenomena different from the simple mega-city … basins dense of population and activities which simultaneously work as both local systems and complex ecosystems, linking, through communication as well as high-speed networks, some clusters of more than tens of cities.”²
Many authors invite to abandon “… simplified conceptions of ‘urban age’ based on population movement from rural zones to urban areas, conversely observing how – by now – the whole planet, directly or indirectly, should be considered as a fully urbanized land, where implosions and explosions, concentrations and thinningouts occur, which is no longer suitable to be subdivided into the categories of urban, suburban, rural and of ‘elsewhere’, that does not have either of the two characters.”3 The latest, maybe included in the Clément’s idiom of the “Third Landscape,”4 is actually one of the main strength of the anthropic territory, for it contains a lot of potential for improvement, interchanges and sustainable actions, so representing a chance for facilitating the transition towards a new way of transforming the landscape for a right balance between cultural and natural ecosystems. In fact this approach can be focused not only regarding the preserving and proportion aspects, so as to make them less impactive and more harmonic, but also and mainly in terms of health: of Planet as well as of its inhabitants (man and other living organisms). […]