Sustainability of Local Plans and Urban Sectors. Proposal for an Operating Procedure

The city is the human structure with the largest consumption of energy. To achieve more sustainable levels of resource's usage and to reduce its environmental impact, the city needs to transform its way of working. For this purpose, it is necessary to act on the urban structure by ensuring that the essential resources become more and more efficient. To achieve this fundamental goal we can act by improving the functioning of both the existing urban structures, and of the new planning actions. For the latter, it is desirable to build a plan containing elements of sustainability that, once implemented, will enable the direct achievement of our objectives. It is appropriate to identify the right planning level to which we can apply these innovative procedures. Despite the fact that the extension of the planned area may vary from case to case, we can assume the scale of the neighbourhood/urban sector scale is the best thanks to its two basic features: the limited extension, and the immediate possibility to transform the indications of plan in physical and functional elements. The goal of the paper is to specify the characteristics of these plans and the size of their effects on the creation of urban areas that seeks to become neutral in the consumptions (Zero Impact Neighborhoods).