• Energy Research

Climate change can be considered as one of the main environmental topic of the 21st century (IPCC, 2011). It poses a serious challenge for cities all over the world (EEA, 2012): cities show, on the one hand a high level of vulnerability in face of climate change, on the other hand, they are responsible for 60% to 80% of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which represent the main causes of change in climate conditions. In 2011, the 73% of European population was living in urban areas and the level of urbanization is expected to be at 82% by 2050 (UN, 2012). Due to the evidence that in Europe the 69% of all GHG emissions are currently generated by cities, larger and larger is the attention devoted, by scientific literature and policy makers, to outline strategies for urban adaptation to climate change, both at European and local scale. Governments and scholars currently highlight the need for strengthening urban resilience in face of climate change and related consequences. By this perspective, some actions are already running, even though a clear identification of the features which make a city resilient in face of climate change is still missing. To fill this gap, this contribution is mainly addressed to: - provide, by integrating different disciplinary perspectives, a conceptual model of the set of adaptive capacities and properties that characterize a resilient system; - verify, starting from a snapshot of current strategies and actions for urban adaptation currently implemented at European level, the consistency between those strategies and the identified set of resilience capacities and properties.

By referring to the wider strategies set up, starting from the middle of the Nineties, by the European cities to promote a sustainable urban mobility and to the more recent concept of soft mobility, which generally includes pedestrian and cycling mobility, this contribution focuses on pedestrian mobility in urban areas, outlining criteria and methods for planning and designing networks of urban public open spaces, such as roads and squares, devoted to an exclusive or prevailing pedestrian use. First of all, the paper analyzes the multiple roles played by roads and squares within the cities: “axes” supporting different mobility flows, including the pedestrian ones, and in the meanwhile urban places in which different activities (commercial activities, meeting, and so on) take place. Grounding on that, the main reasons driving toward an organization of such spaces as urban networks have been outlined. Then, some guidelines and methodological elements, both for planning pedestrian networks and designing their elements taking into account the correspondence between foreseen uses and spatial features of each element, have been provided. Furthermore, the links between the pedestrian networks and the main junctions of other urban mobility networks, as well as between the first ones and the urban contexts have been stressed. Suggested guidelines and methodological elements have been applied and tested both on historical and suburban areas of the city of Naples; nevertheless they represent only a first step towards the setting up of a method for pedestrian networks planning and design in urban areas. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, Vol 2 (2009): Selected Papers 2009

Climate change is one of the main environmental issues challenging cities in the 21st century. The change in climate conditions is largely due to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Cities are considered as the main factor responsible for GHG emissions, whose amount could still rise due to the expected increase of urban population. Thus, climate change and the growth of urban population appear closely linked in a negative loop and the ways in which their trends will develop and interact will be of great consequence to the wellbeing of human populations in the future. Up to now, European efforts have been largely focused on the mitigation of climate change. Only recently, the European Union (EU) has stressed that – even though mitigation strategies still remain a priority – a larger focus has to be devoted to adaptation measures, in order to face the unavoidable impacts and related economic, environmental and social costs of climate change. Grounding on these premises and according to the Rio+20 Declaration “The Future We Want”, this contribution explores the role of adaptation planning for driving European cities towards the achievement of sustainability goals, emphasizing the need for a better integration of disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation policies in urban planning. Current Adaptation plans, in fact, are likely to become a further sectoral tool, scarcely related to policies and tools for both disaster risk mitigation and land-use planning.

Contemporary cities have to deal with numerous challenges, from the growth and aging of urban populations to the scarcity of resources; from environmental degradation to climate change. The latter, also due to the increasing severity of climate-related impacts on urban areas, is widely considered one of the most urgent challenges for urban development in the near future: cities are the main contributors to energy consumption and GHG emissions, paying, at the same time, the highest price for the climate impacts. Thus, climate issues have gained increasing importance in the last decades, both in terms of the metaphors coined by scholars relative to urban future (low-carbon cities, transition cities, smart cities, resilient cities, etc.) and in terms of the initiatives undertaken on different institutional levels. Unfortunately, mitigation and adaptation are generally regarded as two different approaches, neglecting the potential synergies and trade-offs between the related strategies. Hence, based on the growing awareness of the need for mainstreaming mitigation and adaptation policies at city level, this study will provide an overview of the state of the art of the mitigation and adaptation initiatives in Italian metropolitan cities. Then, focusing on the concepts of the “smart” and the “resilient” city – recognized as key concepts for reducing CO2 emissions and improving the ability of cities to respond to climate impacts – and with reference to a conceptual framework for building up a smart and resilient urban system carried out in previous research works (Papa et al., 2015), the study will examine case studies of the cities of Rotterdam and Barcelona, highlighting how this framework may improve our understanding and, above all, contribute to better integration of the fragmented on-going strategies and initiatives. Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2015: ECCA 2015 - Smart and Resilient Cities. Ideas and Practices from the South of Europe

Although the increase in the frequency and intensity of disasters assigns a key role to disaster risk management in current debate on sustainable development, the efforts of national and local authorities to develop risk-informed planning strategies and increase disaster preparedness are still limited. In multi-hazard urban environments, the main criticality to support risk-informed planning strategies is the persisting lack of effective knowledge bases focused on the vulnerability of exposed assets to different hazards. Hence, this contribution, according to the first priority of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction—understanding disaster risk—and by tidying up methods and indicators developed in both EU research projects and scientific studies devoted to multi-risk and vulnerability assessment, aims at better using available knowledge to guide risk-informed spatial planning. In detail, an indicator-based method to carry out a comprehensive exposure and vulnerability analysis has been outlined and tested on a case study area, the multi-hazard urban area of Campi Flegrei, located in the western part of the metropolitan city of Naples in the South of Italy. The proposed method may contribute to the building up of an effective risk knowledge base, enabling planners to easily access information on exposure and vulnerabilities to different hazards, and to differently combine them into output maps capable of supporting risk- informed planning strategies.

In respect to the numerous environmental challenges that cities have to face in the next future, namely to energy issues and to the increasing impacts of climate change, this contribution aims at providing innovative approaches, strategies and tools for improving cities' response to climate-related issues. According to this aim, the first chapter focuses on the two concepts of vulnerability and resilience, both of them concerned with how systems react to internal and external pressures, highlighting the complementarities between a vulnerability and a resilience-based approach for promoting a sustainable, safe and less energy consuming urban development; then, focusing on current strategies addressing mitigation and adaptation to climate change, the main relationships among current strategies and spatial planning will be explored; finally, an innovative tool for the evaluation of spatial plans at local scale and of built-up areas, capable to assess the overall sustainability of cities' development paths in the face of climate change, will be presented.

In the last decades, urban areas have been more and more frequently hit by hazards with catastrophic impacts on human and natural resources. Urban disasters are often characterized as an interactive mix of natural, technological and social events, due to changes of hazards, exposure and vulnerability of territorial systems and to the interactive mix of such changes. These issues are critical both for urban planning and sustainable development, since hazards pose a relevant threat both to the development of cities and to the safeguarding of human and natural resources for the benefit of future generations. Accordingly, the need for integrating both environmental and disaster risk considerations into spatial planning has been largely emphasized. Since the eighties, the role played by environmental issues in land use planning has been consistently growing in all European countries. Nowadays, almost all land use planning processes have to be subjected to a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). On the opposite, Disasters Risk Reduction still represents a marginal goal in land use planning. Risk assessment and prevention is mainly faced through sectoral planning tools, based on a hazard oriented approach and devoting scarce attention to the vulnerability of human and natural resources. Furthermore, risk features as well as the potential impacts of planning policies on such features are often neglected within the SEAs. To face these criticalities, a new tool, the SERA, which could largely contribute to an effective integration of Risk Assessment (RA) into the SEA has been provided. This tool is addressed to support land use planners in evaluating the impact that land use planning choices might have on environmental features of the territory, including risks.