It is notable that indoor environment quality plays a crucial role in guaranteeing health, especially if we consider that people spend more than 90% of their time indoors, a percentage that increases for people on low income. This role assumes even further significance when dealing with distressed urban areas, vulnerable areas within cities that suffer from multiple deprivations. The community-based interdisciplinary research-action group of the University La Sapienza focused on a complex in the outskirts of Rome. The aim was to assess the correlations between architectural aspects of the indoor environment, socio-economic conditions, such as lifestyles and housing conditions, and eventually health outcomes. The intent of providing a comparative methodology in a context where official data is hard to find, led to the integration of social, health, and housing questionnaires with various environmental software simulations. What emerged is that underprivileged housing conditions, characterized by mold, humidity, unhealthiness, thermohygrometric discomfort, architectural barriers, and overcrowding, are often associated with recurrent pathologies linked to arthritis, respiratory diseases, and domestic accidents.

This study, carried out by a multidisciplinary research team, deals with the participatory regeneration process of a marginal residential area in the city of Rome. The research focuses on the theme of urban health and the improvement of indoor and outdoor living conditions according to a people-oriented approach. The work was carried out on two fronts: desk research based on urban, health and socio-demographic sources, and a series of field studies. An operational protocol valid in informal contexts, which escape official censuses, was thus elaborated in order to assign objective values of social and housing discomfort, to measure the concept of urban welfare and to identify possible regeneration strategies for the informal habitat.

The multiple risks induced by climate change on tangible cultural heritage, distributed across different spatial scales, require an integrated and multidisciplinary assessment approach. In this context, the research conducted by the Sapienza PNRR group developed and applied to the case study of Tortona, Italy, a multi-scalar mapping methodology aimed at assessing the risks arising from the combined and interactive effects of climatic factors. The methodological framework integrates GIS analyses, climate monitoring, and microclimatic simulations, enabling the quantification of climate change impacts, and the examination of cultural heritage vulnerability in relation to specific degradation phenomena at territorial, urban, and local scales.