Resili(g)ence: New Advanced Strategies for MedNet Cities & River Courses

In the context of the today big urban and territorial mutations and the associated climatic changes effects, holistic approaches to our contemporary multi-cities – and in particular to our Mediterranean "geo-urbanities" (Gausa, 2009) – reclaim the use of new qualitative urban development policies associated to integrated techno-environmental logics, in positive synergy. Working with environmental complex systems requires advanced, proactive and responsive responses, that work in dual tracks: whit the prevention and mitigation of conflicts or deficits, urban-territorial stresses and deficient land-use inertia, through the interconnection of systematized data, and on the other tracks with the programming of strategic interventions through articulated and intertwined systems. The environmental main topics need to be combined today with new qualitative land-uses, eco-systemic proactive processes and community shared relationships, referring them to complex, crossed and networked strategic fields of investigation and prospection, which interconnected, configure also a framework of multiple innovative experiences today. The combination "information (trended) + Interaction (tended) + integration (tensed) + Innovation (tested)" announces new dynamics of advanced urban planning aimed at advanced interdisciplinary research, oriented to structured conjugations between operative systems capable of taking in consideration the multiple dimensions, going beyond the pure informational data management (Smart Cities) to the networked systematic and strategic-planning projection (Intelligent Contexts). The term Resili(g)ence combines ‘intelligent values’ (information, knowledge, projection) with ‘resilient values’ (resistance, recycling, recovery and adaptation) in a new responsive, sensory, and sensitive condition capable of creating real transition landscapes between Cities and Natures, Contexts and Times, Senses and Sensibilities (Gausa, 2021, Canessa, 2021). This theoretical reflections and practical interventions, but site specific, want to be the basis of this prospective approach. In fact, the Mediterranean coast, especially that of the so-called Latin Arc, presents an important series of sequential mountain-sea watercourses, as well as a rosary of port-capitals and medium-sized and intermediate cities, normally located between two principal waterways. Unlike the large inland cities where the river plays a great role of exchange and central nodality, the great focal presence of the sea on the coast has been allocating these lateralized river courses in peripheral spaces associated with a strong presence of industrial, infrastructural, logistics and storage or agricultural accumulations, poorly cared for and with regular and unexpected episodes linked to floods, landslides, self-occupation, etc. In the current metropolitan urban dynamics, generated beyond the old borders "between rivers", these spaces have gone from having a peri-urban value to gaining a new polarizing, commercial, tourist and social value, almost-central. The need to treat them with new qualitative and intelligent strategies has been revealed in a very short time, combining spatial design and new socio-environmental technologies: the cases of the Llobregat and Besós-Maresme rivers in Barcelona, of la Val Polcevera and Val Bisagno in Genoa, as well as the Paillon and Var rivers in Nice (among other examples present in Spain, Italy or France) reveal paradigmatic cases studies and prospective where actions already carried out are combined with ongoing proposals, some of them projected in collaboration with the GIC-LAB Laboratory that articulates line of research on the Mediterranean coastal multi-city at UNIGE.