Roma e le sfide dell’urbanistica di prossimità nell’era delle transizioni. Ostiense - San Paolo e Pietralata

This research addresses urban regeneration by adopting proximity planning as an interpretive paradigm for improving the quality of living. Accordingly, proximity is explored as a possible urban planning variable that can be measured and applied to urban transformation strategies. To make the testing of this paradigm operational, the research identifies, as its field of inquiry, the urban scale of small cities within the city, which emerges inductively as a suitable scale, capable of engaging effectively both with the specific features of local contexts and with the overall urban system. Within this structured argument lies the relationship between conformance and performance: urban planning, historically oriented towards the former and thus towards the regulation of spatial arrangements, is now required - in the era of ecological and energy transitions - to embrace a paradigm shift by integrating parameters derived from environmental sciences and assessing the effects of urban transformations against temporal targets, limits and dimensional thresholds, thereby shifting attention from the principle of conformance to that of coherence, understood also as the capacity to produce outcomes consistent with the ambitions of the transition. Against this background, the thesis’s main contribution is the development of the Urban Proximity Framework (UPF), an evaluative and operational model intended to make proximity planning a tool for supporting public decision-making. First, the framework is designed to monitor the evolution of the design process and guide its outcomes towards standards consistent with the requirements of a city oriented towards good living. Second, it is conceived as a support device for public administrations, aimed at assessing the quality of planning and design in their preliminary stages. It is grounded in a systemic approach, methodologically akin to other models in the literature; accordingly, its validation is carried out through an analytical-comparative method, applying it to two case studies. The research thus seeks to contribute to the contemporary urban planning debate through an integrated reading of theory and application, offering a methodological advance in the definition of tools capable of steering urban regeneration towards more coherent, measurable and integrated models.