Dear Colleagues,

Fifty-five percent of the world’s population lives in cities, and according to a report by the International Resource Panel instituted within the UN’s Environment Programme (UNEP) by 2050 a good 2.5 billion people will move to urban areas, with an expected 125% increase in natural resource consumption. The international scientific community and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2019) maintain that the effects of extreme climate events are further aggravated by human activities. Global climate change thus represents an emergency being felt increasingly even on the local scale. In particular, various studies have shown how cities are affected by extreme climate phenomena such as heatwaves, increasingly frequent and intense precipitation, and atmospheric pollution. All these aspects generate uncomfortable conditions and reduce the quality of life. To contrast or limit the impact of these phenomena, improve urban territory’s resilience to environmental stresses, and increase urban health,  actions to reduce impermeabilization, renaturalize the land, enable urban forestation, and to adjust systems and societies to withstand the impacts of climate change have to be developed. The current scientific debate is focused on the need to formulate effective policies for adaptation and mitigation to climate change. In particular, most adaptation studies deal with governance, social learning, and vulnerability assessments, while paying little attention to physical planning and urban design interventions. There is a clear mismatch between the long time horizons of climate change impacts and the effects of adaptation actions; between the costs of adaptation planning that tend to arise in the short term and the benefits that often materialize in the long run.

The concept of “urban health” and the role of urban design in the quality promotion of the cities’ living spaces has been present in the international debate for some decades, but only since the publication of the “New Urban Agenda” (WHO 2016), health has been defined as “one of the most effective markers of any city’s sustainable development”. Moreover, the pandemic emergency we are experiencing imposes even more compelling reflection on the relationship between health and the city, and on the role of research and city administration to understand what the city of the future will be like. Within this framework, the special issue wants to promote research methodologies and tools to deal with the effects of climate change on urban health and equity in assessing urban regeneration in healthy cities and limiting  climate change effects on health and equity in urban contexts. It wants, also, identifying urban planning measures and tools that implement the climate change adaptation and mitigation actions concretely, avoiding too long times.

Dr. Roberta Cocci Grifoni
Dr. Maria Federica Ottone
Dr. Rosalba D’Onofrio
Dr. Elio Trusiani
Guest Editors

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• nature based solutions
• urban heat island
• air pollution
• urban modelling
• urban health
• urban governance
• urban planning
• urban regeneration
• sustainable design