From the presentation of Ecosistema Urbano 2023: an extract of the speech by the CEO of Ambiente Italia Mario Zambrini
Urban Ecosystem is developed within the collaboration between Legambiente and Ambiente Italia which had already resulted in the publication of an annual report on the state of the environment in Italy since 1989.
Between the late 90s and early 2000s, Ambiente Italia had gained substantial experience in setting up reports on the state of the environment, contributing to the drafting of reports for many Italian cities and provinces, then assisting them in setting up and drafting tools participate for the urban development planning according to sustainability criteria (local Agenda XXI).
The awareness of central role that cities were taking on - even at a global level - in orienting the trends of the main parameters relevant to the objectives of sustainable development and environmental quality, convinced us of the opportunity to build an analysis and evaluation tool for the urban environment that would allow us to synthetically and comparatively evaluate the performance of our cities. A reporting system updated on an annual basis, structured into a complex set of status, pressure and response indicators, consistently with the model proposed by the OECD since the early 90s.
Thus the Urban Ecosystem was born: a pioneering project, because no similar tool was available at the time, neither by institutional bodies (the National Agency for Environmental Protection was born the same year as Ecosistema, the regional agencies would come several years later) nor by other public or private entities.
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In these thirty years, sustainability has become a sort of mantra, the subject of conferences, studies, university chairs, ministries and departments, evaluation and rating systems. What was pioneering thirty years ago has become today mainstream, and those objectives of environmental quality and sustainability of urban development that Ecosistema set out to promote should now be the basis of the governance of urban territory.
The conditional is, as they say, obligatory. Because the huge media fortune of the concept of sustainability allows it to be expressed in the most disparate and sometimes contradictory forms. These last few years, marked by pandemics, wars and economic crises, have demonstrated how random decisions solemnly taken can be, even at the highest levels (the Paris Agreement is a good example).
Nonetheless, on a communicative level, sustainability is, as I said before, a universally accepted principle, under the banner of which other more or less suggestive watchwords are becoming established: from the ambivalent "urban marketing" to "urban regeneration", an evocative concept of "good practices for land recovery and saving" which however risks, in generalized use, to limit itself to the function of reassuring good label to ennoble any real estate transaction. The greenwashing risk it's always around the corner...
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In any case, the environment of our cities today is the subject of much greater attention than it was thirty years ago, and for this, I think a small part of the credit can be given to Ecosistema Urbano.
Thirty years after the first edition, various indicators of both state and pressure which, again, response, present clear trends towards improvement (see the chapter comparing the data from the first editions published in the report presented today), other indicators are no longer used and have been replaced by new metrics. The awareness of administrations has certainly increased, and with it the desire to implement coherent policies (the 2023 report recounts several); on the other hand, over the past thirty years the resources available to those policies have gradually decreased, and the spending capacity of local administrations is now often insufficient to guarantee adequate levels of service in various fields.
Urban and territorial policies must then come to terms with private interests and land ownership; and in a country that in over sixty years of republican life has not been able to give itself credible legislation on land management, the comparison is, to say the least, unequal. New drivers are appearing on the urban policy scene; new actors and new segments of demand take on centrality and guide development (or regeneration) choices according to logics not necessarily inspired by sustainability (even if always presented as such).
In conclusion, I believe that other dynamics will need to be monitored, and other questions will need to be answered in the next editions of Ecosistema Urbano (in the next thirty, at least). We will have to continue to monitor environmental conditions of our cities, but it will also be necessary to ask ourselves who - from those conditions - can and should benefit.