The challenges of regeneration, which interlace deeply with broader urban, economic, social and environmental issues, are a quintessential example of the complexities that modern development challenges entail. Furthermore, these challenges perfectly exemplify the need for integrated, multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approaches which can effectively dovetail public goals with private interests, short-term objectives with more long-term strategies, and a positive social impact with the need for economic and financial Sustainability.
During the last decades, approaches to urban regeneration have evolved by increasingly recognizing the importance and leading position of these issues, and the need to address them: additionally, a growing number of actors have taken up the topic by contributing with their resources, experiences, and knowledge, or by developing new solutions - therefore enabling the use of new (or previously overlooked) levers for innovation.
It is therefore necessary, now more than ever, to be able to reconstruct and mix the pieces of this mosaic in a new way, in order to move towards a more systemic view of regeneration: one that can highlight and connect all the factors that are essential in order to make real world initiatives successful - such as the involvement of communities, the quality of real estate interventions, the mobilization of public-private financial resources, the safeguard of collective interests and the development of more “polycentric” cities that are also rich in socio-economic and cultural biodiversity