A New Resilient Mobility for the City of L’aquila. The Case Study of the Aterno River

The approach that sees the river basin as the essential territorial unit for enhancing strategies for sustainable development is conirmed in several documents by European Commission (Dir. 2000/60/CE) and United Nations (UNEP, 1992). This contribution aims to analyze the case study of the city of L’Aquila (Abruzzo Region), whose settlement structure is profoundly changed after the earthquake of April 6, 2009. An uncontrolled and accelerated settlement expansion has effectively happened, due to the changed needs of housing localization and production buildings, mostly characterized (net to State emergency buildings) by little sized “homemade” buildings. This interventions are concentrated in suburban agricultural sectors, near the Aterno River, the main river that runs through the city from the northwest to the southeast side. The change in the settlement shape and its distribution produced new types of landscape, which today are daily used from population for housing and production activities, causing the loss of the river landscape its features of naturalness and support to agriculture. In addition, most of urban function have been ejected from the historical centre of the city and have been concentrated in the east and west suburbs, both touched by the river. The river also represents the only natural connection west-est in the south side of the city, runs parallel and very close to the two major territorial crossing infrastructures: a highway and a railroad. This approach is situated within a larger framework which is the redeinition of the strategy for the replanning of a city which is completely different from the one in the pre-earthquake. The Urban Planning Project, intended as a project of land use conigurations and then as a landscape project, could lead new economies and lifestyles and could help to deine a New Social Development Model for the city itself.