Post-DANA reconstruction special plan

After the DANA floods of October 2024, the municipality needed its planning to respond to flood risk with preventive measures. The general plan in force dates from the late 1990s and did not consider the effects of climate change on the frequency and intensity of floods, and the planning protection of the watercourse was limited to a narrow strip around the bed. Next to the channel, ordinary rural land held scattered uses —abandoned market gardens, sheds, storage yards and the odd workshop— and there was no open space at a territorial scale. In parts of the riverside, moreover, the ground falls away from the channel towards the town, so overflowing water tends to move away from the bed and is hard to drain.

The studio approached the response through planning, not just through works. Three alternatives were compared —doing nothing, carrying out mitigation works without changing the zoning, and combining them with a new land-use plan— and the third was chosen: without control of the land, the mitigation measures cannot be carried out.

The proposal designates a river-affected zone of some 51 ha that ceases to be ordinary rural land. Most of it, about 49 ha, becomes protected land with no building: new housing, vulnerable buildings and installations, landfill, storage, fencing and any obstacle that reduces discharge capacity are prohibited, while open spaces, walking and cycling routes and environmental restoration are permitted.

In the strip that adjoins the town, three public parks totalling about 2.2 ha are zoned with floodable design criteria: permeable paving, robust or removable furniture, no element that acts as a barrier to the flow, and solutions that allow the space to be brought back into use soon after a flood. The protective measure thus has an everyday use, because a space that is not used is neglected and ends up losing its function. The proposal also regularises as community facilities some plots zoned as parkland that in practice already function as facilities, and even so the balance of public parkland remains positive, with close to 0.9 ha more.

The studio drafted the full documentation for the proposal —information and justification report, information and zoning plans, planning regulations, strategic environmental documentation, economic feasibility study and gender impact report— and submitted it in successive versions between 2025 and 2026, in response to the municipal technical reports.