L’energia è nell’integrazione delle risorse - Energy is in the integration of resources

Across Europe, in the next future, the combination of shrinkage and ageing trends of the urban population –prevailing in small and medium-sized towns, dispersed settlements, and many marginal and inner areas (European Commission and UN-Habitat 2016; Margaras 2019) – will have important impacts on the quality of life, social cohesion, local economies and public budgets. In this perspective, measures in favour of the usability of essential services and collective equipment play a strategic role, not only in terms of adaptation. They also represent possible antidotes to ongoing settlement and demographic changes and to growing environmental and social fragility, potential attractive factors for new activities and inhabitants, as well as drivers of sustainable development and regeneration of the many cities and places at risk of further peripheralisation (De Rossi, 2018). It is therefore no coincidence that the issues of accessibility and inclusion pervasively cross the Sustainable Development Goals of the Urban Agenda 2030, and the most recent guidance documents for a European Green Deal (European Union 2016; United Nations 2016a, b; European Commission 2019). In a "healthy perspective" and in synergy with welfare policies (Gabellini 2018: 45), making urban spaces accessible to the largest number of people contributes to health and well-being precisely because – through interventions favouring pedestrian and bicycle mobility, public transport, the provision and networking of green areas – it allows to deal with many challenges that contemporary cities are called to tackle: from limiting the impacts of urbanisation processes and vehicular traffic on air, environment and climate; to encouraging physical activity, helping reduce the onset and chronicity of illnesses due to sedentary lifestyles and ageing. In terms of economic sustainability, the relations among preventive actions focused on the improvement of the usability of services, the reorganisation and rationalisation of public spending on social and health care, the reduction of costs borne by individuals and families are evident. The resources that a project for cities accessible for all puts into play are therefore various. This paper questions their integration from three complementary points of view, starting from the results of ongoing research activities in the Italian region Friuli Venezia Giulia.