The demand management: a tool for sustainability and maintenance of urban infrastructure

The challenge of city care involves assuming urban development sustainability as the scenario within which the adequate levels of care, maintenance-conservation and consumption have to compare themselves with development aspirations, but at the same time the consumption/substitution of capitals made of urban resources should be coherent with the exigency of maintaining natural resources as well as those resources generated by anthropic action; such a challenge will have to be won by identifying new forms of urban policy, recognizing and enhancing the value of the role of maintenance for preserving the physical-natural-cultural heritage, by means of scientific processes of planning and control and by carrying out adequate action strategies. The Demand Management represents an important tool to achieve an urban infrastructure management aiming at the optimization of the urban system life cycle and at the settlement sustainability. Such an approach is based on the assumption that infrastructure and urban service assets represent a resource whose use should be carefully planned and managed over time, avoiding a thoughtless use that would accelerate the processes of degradation and resource depletion – because of an inefficient service delivery or because of the construction of a number of structures excessive if compared to the real community needs. The policies of demand management can affect the population’s perception and awareness of service need in order to give alternative answers which don’t require any increases, replacements, or interventions within the existing infrastructure assets. All the possible outcomes of such an approach are relevant both in economical and environmental terms, since they don’t only allow considerable savings in investments in infrastructure re-qualification and/or replacement – whose need is postponed, but they also allow to significantly extend the system life cycles thanks to the decrease in the use intensity and frequency. The demand management policies operate within the current cultural passage from a city populated with objects to a city structured with services, allowing to reduce the distance between the present model of “city of quantity” and the desired “city of quality” structured and organized into a mainly immaterial form of growth. In such a development scenario, the tools for urban management and maintenance are compared to the category of complexity, thanks to the adoption of a systemic-like approach permitting to recognize and identify the several relationships among the quality, sustainability and urban efficiency factors.