I nuovi paesaggi dell'acqua: i conflitti, la governance, il progetto. Storie di una nuova cultura dell’acqua dall’Europa Centro-Mediterranea

This dissertation examines the conditions under which the approaches associated with the new water culture can be pursued in urban and metropolitan landscapes. It positions the implementation of river restoration as a critical juncture within broader socio-ecological transition processes. In contexts characterized by persistent territorial conflicts, strong metropolitan pressures, and entrenched infrastructural systems, restoration rarely emerges as the linear outcome of environmental policies or shared visions. Rather, it tends to result from negotiated processes shaped by complex, fragmented, and multi-actor decision-making dynamics. The research adopts a qualitative, comparative, and interpretive approach. It combines an analysis of the genealogies of water culture in territorial planning and design with an empirical investigation of transition processes in Central–Mediterranean Europe. The first part reconstructs the evolution of planning and territorial design paradigms, with particular attention to the Italian context. It shows how the modern water culture has produced specific spatial and institutional configurations that continue to influence contemporary transformation processes. The second part investigates river and ecological restoration processes in metropolitan contexts in Spain and France. These cases are interpreted as multi-phase and multi-actors processes involving negotiation, institutional adaptation, and the gradual reorientation of spatial strategies. Based on the comparative analysis of the case studies, the dissertation develops processual and morphological models for understanding and supporting the implementation of river restoration in urban contexts. These models provide spatial configuration criteria for the development of scenarios that can support decision-making at the critical stage between the activation of initiatives and their concrete implementation. The main contribution of this research lies in demonstrating that governance and design should not be understood as rigid frameworks that merely accompany implementation. Instead, they function as key operational mechanisms through which the new water culture can be enacted. Governance is therefore interpreted as an adaptive and interactive process, capable of evolving through successive phases and of reorienting itself in response to conflict. Integrated landscape design, in turn, is understood as a spatial mediation tool that can make trade-offs visible, coordinate multi-purpose actions, and sustain implementation over time. Overall, the findings show how integration – across policies, forms of knowledge, actors, and spatial configurations – can be operationalized as a structural component of emerging landscapes shaped by the new water culture. Within these landscapes, time, space, and process are closely and inseparably intertwined.