Cities dealing with energy issues and climate-related impacts: Approaches, strategies and tools for a sustainable urban development

Abstract

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.