Recycling the city: a sustainable planning framework to reduce, reuse and recycle urban residual spaces

Cities are key locations where Sustainability needs to be addressed at all levels, as land is a finite resource. However, not all urban spaces are exploited at best, and land developers often evaluate unused, misused, or poorly-designed urban portions as impracticable constraints. Further, public authorities lose the challenge to enable and turn these urban spaces into valuable opportunities where Sustainable Urban Development may flourish. Arguing that these spatial elements are at the centre of SUD, the paper elaborates a prototype in the form of a conceptual strategic planning framework, committed to an effective recycling of the city spaces using a flexible and multidisciplinary approach. Firstly, the research focuses upon a broad review of Sustainability literature, highlighting established principles and guidelines, building a sound theoretical base for the new concept. Hence, it investigates origins, identifies and congruently suggests a definition, characterisation and classification for urban “R-Spaces”. Secondly, formal, informal and temporary fitting functions are analysed and inserted into a portfolio meant to enhance adaptability and enlarge the choices for the on-site interventions. Thirdly, the study outlines ideal quality requirements for a sustainable planning process. Then, findings are condensed in the proposal, which is articulated in the individuation of tools, actors, plans, processes and strategies. Afterwards, the prototype is tested upon case studies: Solar Community (Casalecchio di Reno, Bologna) and Hyllie Sustainable City Project, the latter developed via an international workshop (ACSI-Camp, Malmö, Sweden). Besides, the qualitative results suggest, inter alia, the need to right-size spatial interventions, separate structural and operative actors, involve synergies’ multipliers and intermediaries (e.g. entrepreneurial HUBs, innovation agencies, cluster organisations…), maintain stakeholders’ diversity and create a circular process open for new participants. Finally, the paper speculates upon a transfer of the Swedish case study to Italy, and then indicates desirable future researches to favour the prototype implementation.

Lo sviluppo linguistico (L1): L'acquisizione degli articoli nei bambini italiani e spagnoli

This project focuses on the acquisition of Italian and Spanish as mother tongues. Chapter 1 explores some of the main theories concerning language acquisition in order to give a general overview about this field of investigation. Chapter 2 presents the main steps of the acquisition of Italian and Spanish during childhood as described by Camaioni (2001) and Hernández Pina (1990). Chapter 3 contains an analysis carried out on several transcripts of natural conversations between children and their parents. Particular attention was paid to understand how Italian and Spanish children acquire definite and indefinite articles between 18 and 30 months of age. The goal of this paper is to understand whether Italian and Spanish children follow the same pattern of language acquisition when articles are considered, given the undoubtable similarity of these two Romance languages. The results of this study suggest that the acquisition of articles by native Italian and Spanish speakers mirrors such similarity. Yet, Spanish children seem faster at learning new uses of articles (i.e. articulated prepositions), but at first they make many more mistakes compared to Italians. This suggests that Spanish children tend to make experiments with the linguistic items they already know in order to increase their linguistic competences. On the other hand, Italians seem slower at learning new features of their mother tongue, but the number of mistakes they make is generally lower, which suggests that they rather stabilize their competences before learning new ones. The analysis also highlights the importance of imitation in the process of language acquisition: children tend to repeat what they hear from their parents to learn new features of their mother tongue. Needless to say, this paper only aims at serving as a springboard for further investigation, since language acquisition remains a fascinating and largely unsolved process.