Culture is Complex, and we must have strategies.

There is no doubt that cultural development requires a strategic approach.
Worldwide, urban areas are experiencing a process significantly different from the merely expansive path that public administration and private investors have longly prompted over the XX century.
Nowadays, growth is not only an economic concern: it is, indeed, the result of different innovation processes related to various aspect of the democratic and the economic life of our Countries.
These processes prompt for a new urban planning philosophy where a team of experts should coordinate different topics.
Urban planners should take into account cultural, economic, infrastructural, social, and technological instances.
Today, the goal in urban and regional planning is to achieve a better quality of life.
Such an objective calls us (public administrations, private investors, and experts) in defining growth patterns able at improving the economic conditions of citizens while improving social liveability, social cohesion, and cultural consciousness.
With the rise of Cultural and Creative Industries, the cultural sector acquired a central role within the urban planning activities.
Leisure activities, indeed, enable identity strengthening processes, improve commercial areas pedestrian (and non-pedestrian) flows, increment the sense of satisfaction of the citizenship and contribute to the overall economic growth of a defined geographical area.
This number of Tafter Journal underlines the great variety of approaches the Urban Renewal patterns require.
Experts and public administrators should grow faster than the complexity of our urban areas and of our needs. Technological innovations (such as big-data) and non-technological innovations (such as the setting-up of new partnership models between the public and the private sectors for the management of specific urban areas) are just tools that we can use to increase the quality of our cities.
Today, the most important difficulty is the lack of a strategic vision that many cities (both in Western or in the Eastern world) are experiencing.
Tomorrow’s planners should start their city-vision from this: there is no city-development without a shared and well-designed strategic vision.
The more complex the vision is, the more detailed and well designed are the activities realized.
In cities, we live our lives, we see our children growing up, we achieve our life-objectives and we follow our passions and interests.
Surely you’re not thinking that Urban Design should still be only a logistic concern, isn’t it?