Vol. 6 (2019): RESILIENCE BETWEEN MITIGATION AND ADAPTATION

AGATHÓN issue 6, titled ‘Resilience between Mitigation and Adaptation’ collects reflections on environmental, climatic and anthropic changes that characterize the beginning of this millennium and that are an increasingly major subject in the international debate since they influence, on the one hand, the protection of territories, landscapes and fragile urban areas, on the other the uses, performance and efficiency of architectural artefacts and everyday objects. Moreover, the shortage of natural resources, the global economic crisis, mass migratory flows, and the unpredictability of seismic events, are a source of continuous instability which can be dealt only with ‘resilient thoughts’ capable of answering continuous or sudden changes.
Within a positive dynamic process, aimed at managing events and rebuilding a new balance (landscape, urban, architectural, economic, social, etc.), Resilience does not imply the restoration of an initial state, but the acquisition of a new balance and maintenance of functionality through two approach strategies. The first strategy is Adaptive, focused on the dynamic nature of operational methods – from ideational, compositional/design, to productive, realization, operational and management methods – in which all the elements of the built environment, from the territorial, urban and building scale, to the material and object scale, effectively adapt to new balances with higher performance levels; The second strategy is Mitigative, where research is directed to innovative technologies (process, project and products) aimed at risk prevention and minimizing any impact – concerning disturbing events due to environmental, seismic, anthropic and social change – and aiming at the realization of territorial urban systems, buildings, components, objects, and sensitive materials, with variable behaviour and in energetic-dynamic equilibrium with climatic and environmental changes.
In the published articles is widely highlighted, under various disciplinary and scientific facets, the pressing action of climate, environmental and anthropic changes on the environment in general, and in particular to the urban one. This issue of AGATHÓN contains varied methods, research, considerations and projects, all aiming both at adaptive Architecture and Resilience Design, focused on achieving a sustainable symbiotic relation between man and the Planet in which we live.