The construction industry has witnessed an increase in the use of digital tools and smart solutions, particularly in the realm of building energy automation. While realising the potential benefits of smart cities, a broader scope of smart initiatives is required to support the transition from smart buildings towards smart neighbourhoods, which are considered critical urban development units. To support the interplay of smart solutions between buildings and neighbourhoods, this study aimed to collect and review all the smart solutions presented in existing scientific articles, the technical literature, and realised European projects. These solutions were classified into two main sections, buildings and neighbourhoods, which were investigated through five domains: building-energy-related uses, renewable energy sources, water, waste, and open space management. The quantitative outcomes demonstrated the potential benefits of implementing smart solutions in areas ranging from buildings to neighbourhoods. Moreover, this research concluded that the true enhancement of energy conservation goes beyond the building’s energy components and can be genuinely achieved by integrating intelligent neighbourhood elements owing to their strong interdependencies. Future research should assess the effectiveness of these solutions in resource conservation.

In the past decade, urban agriculture (UA) has attracted significant attention from urban planners and city managers as a sustainable, nature-based, and smart solution that may generate positive impacts for resilience, self-reliance, and social, economic, and environmental sustainability of cities. UA appears as an effective means to address climate change while also fostering urban transitions to sustainability in many ways, such as creating new commons, amenities, ecosystem services, reinventing urbanity, and encouraging community building by growing local food. Since UA is a strategy to support the re-configuration of more sustainable and resilient cities, it can be considered a seedbed for innovation. Based on these premises, the STRutture Agricole MEtropolitane (STRAME) research project aims at defining an innovative interpretation of the urban farming. The research proposes a vision of the UA based on an intermediate scale compared to the more investigated and developed mega-scale of large vertical farming and the microscale of urban gardens. Conceived as an adaptive infrastructure, STRAME—a system based on modular Vertical Farming units—is organized to be translated and applied in different urban and metropolitan scenarios. The “terrain vague” of metropolises (intended as residual urban spaces) and climate change are two challenges—the first of a physical-spatial type and the second environmental-social—in which STRAME wants to build a capillary system of highly efficient agricultural production. STRAME, starting from deep analysis of the background of UA, aims at defining a physical infrastructure integrated with a digital infrastructure (IoT), able of responding to the challenges posed by the agro-industrial chain in densely populated urban contexts. Its core is a system of modular elements to be used for the construction and commissioning of a medium-sized network of inter-connected vertical farming applicable in residual voids and in the open spaces in large residential districts.

The construction industry has witnessed the increasing use of digital tools and smart solutions, particularly, in the realm of buildings energy automation within the concept of smart cities. While to truly realize the potential benefits of smart cities, a broader scope of smart initiatives is required to support the transition from smart buildings towards smart neighbourhoods, appreciated as the critical unit of urban development. To support this interplay of smart solutions between buildings and neighbourhoods, this article aims to collect and review all smart solutions presented in existing scientific articles, technical literature, and realized European projects. These solutions are classified under two main sections of buildings and neighbourhoods, which are investigated through five domains: buildings energy-related uses, renewable energy sources, water, waste, and open space management. Showcasing the quantitative outcomes demonstrates the potential benefits of implementing smart solutions from buildings to neighbourhoods. Moreover, this research concludes that the true enhancement of energy conservation goes beyond the buildings’ energy component and can be genuinely achieved by integrating intelligent elements of the neighbourhood, due to their strong interdependencies. Future research is recommended to focus on assessing the effectiveness of these solutions towards resource conservation.

Resilience of the built environment, particularly in complex buildings, is strictly related to the effectiveness of systems and sub-systems that provide the expected features to manage risk scenarios in routine and non-routine conditions. In this perspective, maintenance is therefore a key factor to assure building resilience by keeping systems and equipment in the required operational state. Risk management can be empowered if system resilience and disruptive events are monitored in real-time, and, to this aim, proactive maintenance can nowadays monitor systems resilience with innovative digital tools. More specifically, proactive maintenance, through Industry 4.0 (I4.0) tools, can enact control strategies for mitigating both endogenous risks – such as equipment failure, aging and obsolesce not always deeply investigated in building sector – and exogenous risks. Anticipation of disruptive events of systems and control of endogenous risks is possible thanks the introduction of IoT and machine learning tools which may allow to modify the traditional corrective maintenance in the direction of a proactive maintenance approach. Aim of this paper is to highlight how proactive maintenance approach, if fully implemented, and supported by I4.0 tools, can empower resilience of systems in the building sector.