BOOKS BY PIER LUIGI PAOLILLO

In Lombardia la vas ha avuto un’ampia diffusione, coinvolgendo l’intero territorio regionale, per tutte le scale e forme di piano. Molti comuni, a seguito dell’adesione ad Agenda 2000, hanno iniziato a divulgare le proprie Relazioni sullo stato dell’ambiente. A fronte delle tante aspettative riposte nella vas, l’articolo prova a tracciare un bilancio complessivo dell’applicazione di questo strumento in Lombardia. Un’urbanistica virtuosa per vas selettive, giudicatrici, binarie, inequivocabili, e perciò buone scelte per l’intera Regione? La realtà è ben diversa. Confrontando, con un’analisi multidimensionale, tutti i documenti di scoping delle vas elaborati dai comuni lombardi, emerge un quadro deludente. È l’ennesima disfatta disciplinare dinnanzi all’empirismo destrutturato corrente: l’impossibilità di introdurre una vas selettiva, giudicatrice, binaria, inequivocabile

The ‘corea’ of Limbiate was a self built-entity, with no plan, that arose in the post-war years and housed 9,000 immigrants in structures which over the years became part of the urban fabric to the extent that today it is difficult to distinguish them from the rest of the urban build. It was an anticipation of the unbounded ‘corea’ of the Brianza today where you almost never see elements of discontinuity between the towns and villages and the particular features of municipalities have been obliterated by the amoeba like configuration of the Lombard uplands. However, are they still the ‘coree’, the same undifferentiated magma of 60 years ago, or can the plan trace the new latent ‘centres’? Even if here the process of diffusion has standardised the blocks of buildings eliminating the infrastructural hierarchy and the clearly discernible centralities, tools like ‘network community’, ‘space syntax’ and ‘multiple centrality assessment’ can nevertheless assist.

The construction of the map of the landscape in the environmental hinterland of Expo 2015: new general plan of the Groane - The Groane: the only narrow passage that is free between Milan, Varese and Como, one of the most congested places in the country and nevertheless one of those that is most supported with Gdp and the productivity of all Lombardy, its commuters and Vat numbers. It is a sort of 15 km tunnel buffeted between the exceptional processes of urbanisation which have inevitably (and irreparably) impaired its valuable land resources, except of course for the protected area of the Groane Park, which has recently adopted our new general plan for the provincial ‘General Co-ordination Plan’. Its contiguity with the cumbersome attraction of the Expo 2015 - which could have generated dangerous settlement repercussions even for the park - has not, however, caused a murmur to be raised, either because of the economic crisis or, more probably, because the environmental importance of the Groane Park is considered today as value added to be preserved in all ways. In fact there has been absolutely no assault on the land of the park for residential purposes at all. On the contrary, 60% of the areas subject to the new plan increase the perimeter of protection (11% more than at present) on the basis of an initial landscape map which is presented in the article with the construction procedures and the relative methodology.

Un’applicazione avanzata in Lombardia: il piano di governo del territorio di Giussano - It is now a few years since the enactment of the Lombard Regional Law n. 12/2005 «for urban and regional governance of the area» and many municipalities have commenced procedures (but not many have completed them, despite the threat of Art 25, letter C.1, according to which «municipal urban planning regulations in force remain valid [...] for not longer than four years following the entry into force of this law)» to replace the now old municipal general plans which nevertheless represented «the only true form of planning in Italy for almost 40 years» (Oliva, 2005). The time has now come to examine the value in practice of this ‘consolidated law’, enacted by the Lombard legislature in 2005, in order to understand if it has succeeded, according to the aspirations of the initial intentions, in governing the urban complexity of such a complex region. The Giussano (a large municipality located in the Brianza Milanese area) general plan and its environmental assessment is set in this context and both were completed by the Department of Planning and Architecture of the Polytechnic of Milan well ahead of the deadlines set by the Regional Law n. 12/2005.

The construction of the environmental report for the revision of the ‘Territorial Co-ordination Plan’ of the Valle del Lambro regional park, in Lombardy - The environmental report, prepared to assess the sustainability of the decisions made for the new ‘Territorial Plan’ for the Lombard Valle del Lambro regional park, is based on a panel of objectives and interpretative hypotheses supported by a new innovative operating protocol which gave rise to an analytical procedure on the basis of which priorities for intervention were identified and judgments on the environmental sustainability of the decisions were made. The objectives are to obtain judgements on land use phenomena, on the quality of the atmospheric and hydrological environment, on hydrological and anthropic risks and on the structure of the landscape. The interpretative hypotheses are based on the consideration of the land as a ‘complex system’ (Borachia and Paolillo, 1993) where interdependencies must be explored between multi-dimensional components of the environment: this consists of an awareness which is the basis for the use of multi-variable analysis as an inductive method of statistical inference used to select local areas that are homogeneous in terms of environmental problems.