**1. Introduction**

Environmental policies and EU legislation protect natural habitats, keep water and air clean, ensure adequate waste disposal, improve knowledge of toxic

substances and support the transition of businesses to a sustainable economy. While there is not a single Community planning policy because the "planning" has more weight, but in essence it is left to the responsibility of national Governments; on the other hand certainly you can have recourse to an important series of strategies, in fact, the European Union has moved so far mainly at the level of standards (Directives and Regulations) and less at the level of plans and programs. There are "strategic" guidelines of political value and certainly not a "European environmental planning", because the U. E. sets only a reference framework in the various sectors, indicates priorities, suggests the most appropriate means and instruments, but does not interfere with the role of the Member States in terms of planning, except to suggest a general criterion: "integrate planning sustainable in community policy"<sup>1</sup> . This point is important for two reasons:


One of the strategies, for example, concerns the importance of soil protection and was the subject of attention by the European Commission in 2002. Following the publication in 2001 of the sixth European Environment Action Plan, the European Commission adopted the COM [1] "Towards a Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection", building on a specific political commitment to this issue. Soil performs many environmental key-functions which are: biomass production, storage, filtering, buffering and transformation and plays a central role in water protection and the exchange of gases with the atmosphere. It is also a habitat and gene pool, an element of the landscape and cultural heritage, and a provider of raw materials. In order to perform its many functions, it is necessary to maintain soil condition<sup>2</sup> . The soil, however, is an integral part of the territory and the territorial dimension is particularly important in the "planning" processes. So land assessment as a spatial *planning* tool promotes *sustainable development* of space and settlements; it serves to defend the soil resource, to protect it from pollution, contributing to the conservation and improvement of the quality of the environment. The assessment of soils is of particular importance in areas that are already heavily contaminated and ecologically sensitive in which there continues to be a huge demand for spaces intended for construction and expansion.

The present work makes use of data analysis methods in spatial planning. The problem faced in first appeal sets as objective to define the social and economic orders of the area by the point of view of the situation of the state of fact. In these cases, the task is really difficult as it is necessary to take into account a multiplicity of aspects of different nature (economic, social, historical, urban and environmental) and of various dimensions, moreover it is necessary to summarize them to obtain useful information for make assessments that meet community goals. Far this aim, I follow a methodology based on the analysis of the data and in particular on the method of the principal components, on the cluster analysis and on coverings and partitions with fuzzy sets [2]. In such an approach, I have ascertained that a lot of importance it's to attribute to the changes of the general system on which one

<sup>1</sup> Comment taken from "Law and environmental management - II Ed." by Stefano Maglia and AmedeoPostiglione - IrnerioEditore

<sup>2</sup> APAT Agency for the Protection of the Environment and for Technical Services - A "SOIL DEFENSE - EUROPEAN STRATEGY"

#### *Uncertainty Management in Engineering: A Model for the Simulation and Evaluation… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96519*

intervenes, kept account that the means that we have to disposition often result inadequate to gather the entity of the aforesaid changes.

The method is generally adaptable; however, to achieve satisfactory results, it should be used directly to related information with the insights that you pursue.

It is considered that a correct methodological approach to the problems of decision resides in multidimensional analysis. In fact in such type of analysis all the technical, economic, social and environmental aspects, are opportunely valued and balanced.

It is recognized by many people that any intervention on the system baits a complex connection of phenomena, necessity emerges then to favor the orientation and the control of the scales through the use of a model that aim at rationalizing the complexity of the situations and to reduce uncertainty that permeates the planning process. Of it the planning and the evaluation of the interventions have a lot of importance. The evaluation is a tool of control (in progress and ex post) of uncertainty on the evolution of the several elements constituent the general context, kept account of all the different demands expressed from consumers, decision men and technicians, and considering the multiplicity of the preset objectives, the potentialities of the available technologies and the constraints [3].

The government policy of territorial planning implemented in our country as well as in other European and non-European nations has made the problem of finding more valid tools for forecasting and decision-making urgent, with the necessary deepening of the study of methodologies linked to urban culture. The goal then is to implement a methodology adapted for the control and management of information concerning the territory in order to provide a scientific setting of the work steps that precede the action of spatial planning. Such an approach starts after the Second World War, especially in the Anglo-Saxon and US world with the study of urban systems, activity patterns and founding principles of their balance, spatial organization and environmental design models. A stop in the search for patterns of systematic and ordered study has had prevailed when the reductive opinion of mathematical studies to be able to exclusively deal with solving quantitative problems.

In this respect, starting from the eighties onwards.

Explains and justifies the denial explicated by certain architects towards mathematical methods, attitude further motivated error exchange for *schematismo* previously established the need for systematic, order, organic and its symbolism of a scientific theory.

The main role of the scientific disciplines that coordinate and assist the construction of such a setting, it must identify a methodology to build up the logic of abstraction and verification process. In conclusion, the method is always applicable; however, the results must be interpreted in relation to the particular circumstances in which the investigation takes place.

Nowadays the new sciences of complexity, the increasingly heated debate among the philosophers of science, from which relativistic and localistic positions seem to emerge, do not leave much room for the revival of scientific paradigms with models of absolute validity."Local scientific approaches do not cooperate harmoniously with an image, with a theory of knowledge and the universe, but on the contrary they intersect, overlap, ignoreeachother, contrast, integrate, split".

Complexity arises from the awareness that "the type of problems that contemporary society faces cannot be standardized, like the problems faced par excellence by strong disciplines. As already mentioned, the use of procedural standards is as of little use as proposing physical standards. In reality, this awareness is not new, but can be traced back to the 1980s, when the weakening of the nation-state form, the

crisis of political units of great territorial dimension and of the concept of territory as a univocal entity, make the "gravitational" spatial paradigm obsolete, which presupposes a hierarchical structuring of space.

The "restitution" of complexity is strongly linked to the processing of information: moving in a field of consolidated knowledge practices, one is forced to discard everything that is not compatible or can be tamed with knownmeans, reducing the complexity of the phenomena. It's necessary to abandon the old certainties to take new paths, such as those traced by the complexity of relationships and continuous interactions between animate and inanimate components of the same world [4]. The theory of complexity, first of all, is not a scientific theory in the strict sense. It would be better to speak (and indeed some authors do) of "complexity challenge" or "complexity thought" or, better still, "complexity epistemology". It is precisely as an epistemological perspective, in fact, that complexity plays a crucial role in contemporary thought. This is because complexity involves three equally elevant epistemological innovations: a new alliance between philosophy and science, a new way of doing science, a new conception of natural evolution [5]. This chapter makes use of data analysis methods in spatial planning. The exploratory methods of multivariate analysis make it possible to arrive at territorial types (at different scales) that are also significant at an environmental level. The methods of *data analysis* and the *main components* in the work aim to describe the territorial system as an interaction between the physical system and the social system; interpreting needs, evaluating alternative directions of change; support the choice between the alternatives of what you think may contribute most to achieving the objectives of preservation [6].
