Configuration and resilience: some remarks from the case studies of Florence and Milan

The paper aims at focusing on the notion of urban resilience, relating it to the grid configuration. Such relation is based on the assumption that the spatial structure of an urban settlement is intrinsically provided with a supply of resilience – depending on the way its streets, squares, blocks and buildings are spatially arranged and mutually connected -, whereby it reveals a certain capacity to adsorb accidental events and local perturbations without significantly changing its inner geography and global behavior. Intended as the capacity of a settlement to adapt to the variability of uses and conditions, the resilience can hence be considered as a precious resource, essential to be appraised, preserved and increased. Today, in the present ‘age of risk’, such property is to be considered a key issue, as related to the capacity of the system to continue effectively operating even in case of exceptional occurrences, and, in ordinary conditions, to the flexibility of the road network to adapt to the changing functional asset of the settlement. The configurational notion of resilience will hence be introduced; the case studies of Florence and Milan, with their respective differences, offer the opportunity to materialize and discuss the capability of some configurational indices to reliably reproduce it.