Le sfide del progetto urbanistico nelle campagne urbane.The challenges of urban planning in the urban countryside. In Mininni M. (a cura di), le sfide del progetto urbanistico nelle campagna urbane.

Throughout the second half of the last century, the spaces around the city acted as the ground reservoir on which to build new urban expansion. The pictures of the INA Casa settlements are emblematic of this tendency; they stood out against a rural countryside in the prevalently rural society that was Italy immediately after the II World War, beacons of the rapid modernization process that was to ensue. Today, in those spaces, we can read the shorter term movements of the new internal migration phenomena, exoduses against a background of huddles of resistance and immobility of the countryside. At this moment in time, these spaces offer great chances for the city, depending in particular on their ability to compete by proposing new sustainability solutions, featuring a parsimonious use of resources but not excluding even being able to reproduce resources. Urban planning is facing the challenge of blazing a trail in unknown territory, with no recognizable landmarks, at this present time when the possibility of operating social mediation in the urban spaces has declined, people are less and less informed about what is happening around them and few strategies have been identified for collecting and orienting common knowledge. It seemed useful to start from some concrete cases of Italian experiences that have endeavoured to build a city plan involving the periurban agricultural spaces, as a basis on which to draw a preliminary atlas of the state of the art in Italy deriving from these experiences. Some recurrent themes seem to be apparent in this besoin de campagne, where the demographic population reserves of the rural world on which the city relied in cases of need in the past are now being transformed into social groups that are somewhat hard to define, but that show signs of communities