Defining RETURNVILLE: a virtual testbed to support DRM and CCA in urban settlements

Virtual cities are useful tools to support the management and administration of cities, allowing the simulation-based and replicable study of the urban settlements along with their organizational and functional arrangements as well as of socio-economic phenomena. In addition, simulations can inform planners and designers for evaluating current and future policies, as well as transformative trends and the effectiveness of functional-spatial and typological-morphological arrangements for contrasting hazardous phenomena. In this context, the use of simulation processes allows to experiment different relationships between components and select the most relevant parameters to explain real processes. Within the Extended Partnership RETURN - multi-Risk sciEnce for resilienT commUnities undeR a changiNg climate – funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, the RETURNVILLE virtual testbed is built. The configuration of RETURNVILLE starts from the idea underlying the model of Aldo Rossi's Analogous City (1976), proposing a collage of elements and urban parts in the typological-morphological construction of an imagined territory. RETURNVILLE is a digital model allowing to simulate multi-risk processes that can be activated in (portions of) representative contexts of urban and metropolitan settlements in Italy, to assess the impacts and evaluating the effect of alternative Disaster Risk Management DRM and Climate Change Adaptation CCA strategies, e.g through visualization of alternative outcomes of what-if scenarios. RETURNVILLE does not represent a real city, instead it is a digital model allowing to assess realistic contexts. Hence, its constituent parts or urban parts and districts, are defined referring to real urban contexts in Italy; moreover, the urban parts are equipped with real data, allowing for realistic simulations. Indeed, even if not recognizable, the virtual testbed as “simulacrum” should reproduce adequate complexity that only comes from real data. The selection of urban parts to build RETURNVILLE is based on information retrieved from: a) a preliminary proposal of urban settlements clustering of the Italian municipalities; b) the impeding hazard levels for urban settlements for several relevant hazards in Italy; c) real data availability, e.g. from case studies. Considering the urban centredness degree (DPS, 2013) and referring to urban hubs or inter-municipal hubs, i.e. urban settlements which are also service offering centres (stand-alone or as a network), here we introduce a first proposal for RETURNVILLE hypothesized as a virtual city laying on a coastal area. Urban parts characterized by varying density of the built environment (e.g. characteristics of a “dense” city for the centre, or “diffuse” for periphery areas) are selected among municipalities belonging to the clusters containing hubs and inter-municipal hubs, considering also the variable hazard levels for earthquakes, floods, heatwaves and landslides and taking into account ongoing studies and data availability from case-study applications.

References

A.Rossi, La città analoga, in «Lotus», n.13, 1976, pp. 4-7.

DPS (2013). Le aree interne: di quali territori parliamo? Nota esplicativa sul metodo di classificazione delle aree (in Italian). https://www.agenziacoesione.  gov.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Nota_metodologica_Aree_interne-2-1.pdf.

Acknowledgements: This study was carried out within the RETURN Extended Partnership and received funding from the European Union Next-GenerationEU (National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3 – D.D. 1243 2/8/2022, PE0000005