World changing, climate changing, urban changing. Toward a new sustainable urban planning

It is clear, as recently established scientifically, that global change is produced by man-made activities carried out on the planet. For a long time, experts have found anomalies and irrationally risky human actions as regards processes which are destroying environmental systems and their natural biotypes. Cities, where in a few years about the 75% of the global population is expected to live, represent one of the main entropic systems, in particular because of the concentration of climate-altering activities. The attention given to subjects: "sustainable" development, participated urban planning, sustainable mobility, and so on, has been characterising investigations in the field of urban and regional sciences. It is now necessary to achieve a new "ethic" in urban planning, in order to pass from investigation to practice, by codifying a new sustainable process in order to manage territorial transformations. This paper suggests an investigation on this new process, defined as "eco town planning", pointing out the basic features and the systemic approach on which it is based. Finally a case study is described which has been carried out in a mid-size city in Italy: Benevento. An "off-grid" urban district, with no greenhouse gas emissions, has been designed for the new city masterplan.