The Value of Social Integration Tools. A Psychological Intervention on Urban Design in the City of Piacenza

Using the cognition of environmental psychology can help Metropolitan experts and evaluators to understand how to instill a sense of belonging among citizens, and mostly, immigrants, which can help reduce several urban issues, including some value negative effects. This could revitalize social interactions in several neighborhoods, trying to define a dialogue, for various economic, social, and cultural improvements, mainly in a downtown context. In this paper, we discuss the basics of psychological challenges and their connections, trying to define how these elements can help planners to create a sense of belonging in urban spaces and neighborhoods, before giving the reader a relative understanding of the physical-social condition of Piacenza through the connected cognition of the urban setting of the city. Then, in the consideration of the role of some experiences and theories of integration in Europe, the paper will promote some approaches, appropriate to the psychological factors, of designing and evaluating urban settings in the city, promoted in the hexagon analysis of the downtown, also encouraging an implementation model for each of the scale levels.