Smart Growth Proposal

Smart Growth Proposal

Introductory remarks

"Urban Sprawl" is known worldwide as the uncontrolled expansion of low-density, single-use suburban development scattered around the countryside.

Sprawl seems to encompass all the new trends of urban development such as regional scale, speed, mass production and distribution, and the merger of city and countryside (Saunders, 2005). At the very beginning the fragmented environment of low density cities had more or less the same structure. The difference was in the dimension of houses, the wildness of gardens surrounding them the invasiveness of roads and parking areas. Nowadays the suburbs can provide the full range of urbanity traditionally belonging to compact cities. At their edges, at the overlap with the edges of other suburbs within the emerging metropolitan regions, we can find office parks, shopping centres, spacious, well equipped and gleaming commercial activities that tend to improve their look in order to successfully compete with the traditional shops of the urban centres (La Greca, 2009).

The ever-increasing demands of urban and economic development besieged the natural landscape. The only barricade to refrain such a development seems to be the periurban areas. These are shards of country sides within the metropolitan urban fabric. The barriers between urban boundaries and open country side should be re-defined through a new landscape urbanism applied to the interpretation of urban voids, a sort of "periurbanscape" in order to make the agricultural areas surviving within a new urban culture (Kipar, 2009).

The present sensitivity to the issue of climate change determines the need to re-consider urban development in the face of the cultural challenge of new models of settlement. The contemporary city is changing, grows on itself without expanding: the densification strategy is establishing itself as an innovative and high quality approach.

The case study is quite interesting also in order to deal with the theme of sprawl and how it was encouraged by automobile traffic and how allocation of space could be improved. It emerges the key role of a creative public transport approach as the central issue in coping with sprawl.

The work we are carrying on is mainly based on the J. Kenworthy (2009) thesis that the most sustainable transport will largely be determined by the strength and reliability of both land use and transport policy interventions that minimize sprawl, increase the centralization of jobs, and generally favour public transport, walking and cycling over cars.

A mix of solutions has to be detected in order to achieve a relevant reduction in C02 emissions being the latter an imperative facing adaptation to climate change.

The planning approach for Mascalucia aims to highlight the potential role that transport oriented development policy can play to positively influence sound development in cities, for many of the key sustainability characteristics of cities are linked together in a synergistic or interdependent way.

The Metropolitan Context

The city of Mascalucia is one of 27 municipalities within the Catania Metropolitan area. It well exemplifies an highly urbanized settlement with an high percentage of urban ...