CONTEMPORARY URBAN GREEN BELT A proposal for the revision of Rivoli’s land use plan

Recent crises show the weakness of global equilibrium stability and manages to change economic and social relations with consequences all over the world. Today, western cities must deal with new problems and with those of the past that have not yet been solved. Innovations in technology, economy, society, and the come up of the climate change are leading to different and not easily predictable evolution of cities. This thesis aims to analyze the main examples of "Green Belts" and look for parallelism, similarities, and differences between the existing plans and the one designed for the city of Rivoli. Preliminary surveys have been conducted, revealing a territory that has been plagued for decades by sprawl, little attention to cultural heritage and the environment caused by the rapid and poorly planned expansion. To address these issues, the new plan has been imagined to be a tool able to better organize space, land uses, and livability; mending the urban voids left by the past, limiting soil consumption, and encouraging, when necessary, renovation with demolition and reconstruction. The fulcrum of this research is the implementation of a tool that aim to design green wedges through the research developed around the curricular internship carried out in an urban planning studio in charge of drafting a land use variant – variante generale - at the Land Use Town Plan (Piano Regolatore Generale - P.R.G.) of Rivoli in the Metropolitan City of Turin. The plan preparation was supported by the studied of international and national examples; the first is the “Greater London Plan” made by Abercrombie in 1944, a vanguard project, which was extremely successful in creating an optimistic outlook for the people of London post WWII. Then, the plan of Copenhagen “The Fingers Plan” drawn in the 1947 design the city in fingers separated by green wedges which are kept free from urban development. Moreover, the P.G.T. (Piano di Governo del Territorio - Territory Government Plan) of Bergamo and the P.S.C. (Piano Strutturale Comunale - Municipal Structure Plan) of Modena, well-performed plans with two main objectives, updating the prestigious urban tradition and introducing new elements of flexibility, participation, and subsidiarity like green wedge border with a vast array of beneficial effects. The Urban Green Belt originated in the late 1930s to guide spatial design on a regional scale has had many applications and variations in past decades and despite the positive spin-offs of this policy, it has been little used in Italy, this thesis aims to know if its contemporary application on a local scale can limit land consumption and have good spillover on the local territory; The new local spatial dimension makes it close to or far from the original model? And due the different challenges of today’s cities are UGB still a spatial image valid for 2022? Gathering some of the most relevant examples was useful to understand the array of possible applications and management to plan a valid infrastructure for the city of Rivoli. These comparisons from a theoretical point of view show the green wedges methodology applied in different contests and policies. Translated into the real world the long-time need to plan and realize the project can make lose the initial sprint; Excessive bureaucracy, makes these tools excessively complicated and slow, the municipality must have qualified personnel capable of pursuit at best these types of policies and leading the project from paper to reality.