FS 3.126: Spatial-led research, planning and design for Alpine transition

The Alpine Region is at the forefront of a complex and multifaceted transition, shaped by intersecting crises, socio-economic shifts, and pressing demands of ecological and digital transformations. This region is particularly vulnerable due to disparities between remote and metropolitan areas, exacerbated by the impacts of climate change and ecosystem disruptions. These challenges intersect with dynamics of demographic polarizations and structural transformations across traditional and emerging productive activities in different sectors, such as manufacturing, logistics, energy, tourism, and agriculture. These phenomena are creating unprecedented demands on land use and resource management, emphasizing the limits of established spatial planning and design frameworks. Traditional approaches often struggle to address the multifaceted, cross-sectoral, and trans-scalar nature of these challenges, as well as to interact with supra-national and national policies for the Alpine space. Within this framework, the session discusses how spatial-led research, planning and design can return to play a central role in addressing the current processes of transformations in the Alpine Region according to the principles of sustainability, resilience, and antifragility. Specifically, we aim to gather contributions that cope with the ongoing transitions in mountain areas to decrease their territorial disparities, by focusing on the following questions: – what methods of spatial-led research? – what strategies and actions of spatial planning and design? – what innovative approaches, or successful tools and mechanisms of spatial planning and design?