Urban policy design for antifragility

Blecic I.

;Cecchini A.

2024-01-01

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Abstract

Building on previous proposals for antifragile planning, in this chapter we suggest a bridge from theory to practice through a set of operational principles and recommendations for design and management of urban policies and projects. The discussion revolves around principles of via negativa rules, modular design, decentralisation through layering, redundancy, resistance to the urge to supress randomness, skin-in-the-game, and Chesterton’s fence. We discuss the example of the so-called “15-minutes city” to illustrate how the principles of antifragile design provide insights and tools for its critical examination. Given the possible ambivalences of the concept of “15-minutes city”, we suggest how to throw out the bathwater of flat localism" without throwing out the baby of the possibility of a "fractal localism" and multi-scalar integration with appropriate forms of coordination and integration as a real resource of antifragility and of antifragile urban policy. "