Safety and Adaptation for Urban Public Spaces

There is a growing need to design and/or redesign usable, comfortable, but also safe urban spaces, roads and equipment, in which everyone can feel included. The pursuit of safe conditions, including from the various forms of threat and crime, requires the integration of the different existing approaches in order to achieve effective and lasting results. Urban planning can ensure that spaces dedicated to the community and shared use are transformed into as many common goods, thus satisfying the legitimate aspirations of citizens to improve the quality of life, for which safety is important. The issue of urban security is a prerequisite for the creation of sustainable cities and communities as confirmed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda, in particular SDG 11 - Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Specific consideration must be made in relation to the safety conditions of public spaces, with particular reference to urban green areas. More specifically to greening interventions, previous empirical evidence has found that cleaning and greening of empty lots is associated with a reduction in crime. The objective of this EU-funded project (Next Generation EU) entitled “SeTUP - Security Town trough Urban Planning” is that the results of this research will lead to the definition of models that can be implemented in policies, plans and regulations. This work is, in fact, an opportunity for a more careful reflection on the topic in order to identify the key aspects that allow Urban Planning to be oriented towards the environmental prevention of crime risk and towards the definition of specific actions, possibly to be contemplated in the municipal urban plan, for the adaptation, over time, of urban spaces to security criteria. The research is directed at nature-based solutions (Nbs), considering issues of their effectiveness, through the identification of methods and tools with which to evaluate the effectiveness of nature-based solutions that maximise a range of ecological, social and economic co-benefits. By estimating the functions provided by different green materials (tree, bush, hedge) in urban ecosystems, through a purposely developed set of equations, the methodology makes it possible to optimise the development of urban plans by maximising the contribution of vegetation to ecosystem dynamics. In the end, the model made it possible to measure the performance of the Nbs whose subset is the one we considered, to be understood as a starting point to be able to expand the range and measure the other nature-based solutions.