TITLE:
Patterns of Urban Compactness: Indicators of Balance between Built-Up Area and Voids
AUTHORS:
Bernardino Romano, Camilla Sette, Francesco Zullo, Cristina Montaldi
KEYWORDS:
Urban Compactness, Land Take, Urban Standard, Planning Indicators
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.11 No.1,
March
31,
2023
ABSTRACT: An effective response to the current international and EU guidelines of
limiting land take and desirable reversal of the phenomenon, is possible for
Italy only if it succeeds in setting up centralized regional direction
structures for settlement transformations and working on operational planning
tools. Precisely at this level, a different control of classic urban planning
parameters will have to be expressed,
centering attention on the relationship between built-up areas and
property areas (coverage ratio) and orienting it to support urban design from a
soil-saving perspective. This should apply in all homogeneous zones covered in
Italian planning, with a decisive revision of current models. The paper
examines the possibilities of technical action in this direction by simulating land-saving solutions
corresponding to the progressive reduction of areas committed to
construction and formulating proposals to strategically better regulate
urbanization arrangements. The method used is based on the implementation of a
set of indicators from different institutional databases. These relate the size
of the average land area used to locate the individual buildings to the
residential loads of the buildings, showing in both aspects an extraordinarily
low average density that causes extensive land take phenomena.