inURBECitizens

Cities are affected by several grand challenges, i.e. pressing environmental and social issues that affect the entire society. Such challenges are worsened both by the increasing number of inhabitants in cities and by the exacerbation of climate change in recent years. In particular, the urban heat island (UHI) causes urban temperatures to be up to 10 °C higher than those of the surrounding suburbs and worsens heatwaves, aggravating their impact especially on the most vulnerable citizens. Moreover, climate change also brought the exacerbation of extreme events, i.e. higher intensity precipitation in winter and longer dry periods in summer. Built environment may allow to mitigate the above mentioned challenge towards increased resilience. Indeed, the built environment plays a crucial role in mitigating UHI, e.g. by employing cool materials or including green roofs. However, until now, climate change challenges and possible mitigation strategies in the built environment have been analyzed individually, either focusing on buildings or outdoor spaces, neglecting an overall holistic approach. With the inURBECitizens project we instead argue that all the components of the built environment, and all the possible mitigation strategies should be jointly considered under a multi-objective strategy. In addition, while the citizen perspective has been overlooked so far, we contend that their subjective perceptions, which diverge most often from the objective assessment, and their active involvement, are crucial. Through the novel citizen-sourcing paradigm, which leverages citizen science to collect data about subjective and objective perceptions, and crowdsourcing to receive ideas for further improvements, we aim to turn citizens into active actors for a more resilient urban environment. The project is particularly centered with respect to Italian PNRR missions, especially aligned with the objective of improving the resilience of urban areas, mitigating flooding risk, safeguarding urban greenery. It is also in line with the Italian National Research Plan, where a holistic research approach calling for cross-disciplinarity is indicated to face the increasingly complex challenges: in this case, the joint inclusion of social sciences and STEM perspectives is particularly suitable to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies towards resilient, just and inclusive urban areas. The project will provide a comprehensive framework for designing a built environment that simultaneously addresses different climate change challenges through integrated strategies. These integrated strategies will facilitate the adaptation of cities to extreme events by acting on small diffuse outdoor spaces available at the neighborhood scale, to achieve scalable, increased resilience.