Reducing land consumption is a primary goal of European and Italian town planning policies.
The increasing focus on preserving greenfields and encouraging brownfield reuse collides with the need for some strategic infrastructures—such as data centers and logistics facilities—to be located in greenfields, close to intermodal and energy hubs.
The struggle to find suitable brownfields for such developments, however, cannot translate into a “happy degrowth” approach.
A potential solution, aligned with the recent approval of the Nature Restoration Law, lies in offsetting land consumption by renaturalizing brownfields. The proposed approach is to make greenfield transformation conditional upon the redevelopment of an equal amount of brownfields, even in distant municipalities, involving third-party providers to facilitate the process.
This is an innovative model that seeks to balance infrastructural development needs with environmental protection, in line with ongoing initiatives under study.
Guido Inzaghi and Morgen Miragoli explored this topic in an article on ItaliaOggi, proposing a model that could truly mark a new era in the logistics and data center sector.
Read the article here.