Assetti proprietari urbani e prossimità ai servizi ecosistemici: la misura dei drivers ambientali del mercato urbano

There are two factors that determine urban transformation: endogenous factors relating to the local development of a metropolitan area (the city and the hinterland of reference) and exogenous factors linked instead to major external transformation drivers that derive from the role that that city has in the urban reference system. By changing the position of a city within an urban system (in terms of demographic weight, of “capture” of added value and of specialized productions and functions, of accessibility with respect to flows), the “rules” of its transformation also change. Genoa is today a medium-sized city with a large prevalent function (port activity) and some niche productions (technologically advanced sectors), an attractive tourist function that is growing but still modest compared to other realities, a condition of accessibility strongly limited compared to the great high-speed infrastructures and a very weak influence on an extremely “poor” and spatially limited hinterland. Its location in the European urban geography classifies it as a medium-small city. The urban transformation cycles of the last 30 years can be read in terms of this fluctuating location of the city at a national and international level: it has determined the characteristics of the different building cycles (and income) and the role played by the various subjects of urban transformation and by the public actor. The «blue line» (the port-city interface) represents an interesting point of view, because the main urban transformations are concentrated here: productive, commercial, tourist, housing and service functions alternate themselves in a game made of competition / cooperation, which has determined a peculiar mix of partially still unexpressed potential and which will also guide the local economy in the next few years, conditioning the positioning of Genoa in the European panoram