The integration of urban agriculture into cityscapes necessitates a comprehensive understanding of multiple engineering and environmental factors, including urban fabric, building configurations, and dynamic energy and material flows. In contrast to rural settings, urban areas introduce complexities such as hygrothermal fluctuations, variable sunlight exposure and shadow patterns, diverse plant dimensions and shapes, and material interception. To address these challenges, this study presents an open-source Digital Twin model based on the use of a geographical information system (GIS) for near-real-time solar radiation mapping. This methodology aims to optimize crop productivity, enhance resilience, and promote environmental sustainability within urban areas and enables the near-time mapping of the salient features of different portions of the city using available open data. The work is structured into two main parts: (i) definition of the GIS-based Digital Twin model for mapping microclimatic variables (in particular solar radiation) to support sustainable urban agriculture design and (ii) application of the model to the city of Milan to verify its replicability and effectiveness. The key findings are connected to the possibility to integrate open data (solar radiation) with measurements in situ (illuminance and data referred to the specific crops, with related conversion coefficient) to develop a set of maps helpful for urban farmers but also for designers dealing with the synergy between buildings and urban farms. Initially tested on a neighborhood of Milan (Italy), the model will be applied in the Singapore context to verify analogies and differences. This correlation facilitates a more practical and straightforward examination of the relationships between solar irradiation and illuminance values of natural sunlight (involving both incident and diffuse light). The consistency of measurements allows for the precise documentation of these fluctuations, thereby enhancing the understanding of the influence of solar radiation on perceived luminance levels, particularly in urban environments characterized by diverse contextual factors such as vegetation, nearby structures, and geographical positioning.

Considering the wide demand for daily meals, the issue of the institutional food system has become very important in highly developed societies and, also, how it affects the flow of energy and matter within a territory. This research originates from a wide multi-disciplinary project aimed at developing a self-sufficient approach to improve the institutional food system in an area of Northern Italy. Thus, the aim of this research is to give some guidelines to implement ideal scenarios of food production, processing, consumption, and waste management at the local level. To that end, the organization of the supply and demand within the local institutional food system is inquired. A methodology has been developed to analyze the main energy flows and matter related to this catering, and to outline possible optimal scenarios. This methodology also allows to analyze case studies and to formulate improvements in order to reduce their energy consumption while exploring all the steps of the supply chain (considering the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach). The use of quantitative indicators allows a comparison of the impacts related to the different steps characterizing the suggested scenarios. This paper presents results related to a test in the context of institutional catering in public schools.

This research addresses the issue of process innovation for the transformation of the built environment aimed at carbon neutral objectives in urban space. The design experience is based on a game-based learning approach in which collaborative processes and digital technologies support the performance response of the project actions. The collected information is processed with the intention of configuring a digital serious game as an interactive space where citizen, designer and public administrators can understand and simulate urban transformation scenarios and seek shared solutions that can contain the local ecological footprint as close as possible to the sustainable limit.

The paper tests the effectiveness of a methodology used to analyze the water element in the urban context, in supporting design choices oriented toward sustainable water management. In particular, it presents a mapping technique of the variables used for calculating the UWB (Urban Water Balance) using the open data available for Milan. The methodology is applied to a peri-urban area of the city’s southern outskirts, the Corvetto/Chiaravalle district. The availability of the data has allowed identifying the minimum spatial area on which to carry out a balance of water flows using open-source GIS in the census block (CB). The methodology’s effectiveness in supporting the design choices was verified on two specific census blocks, the first representing the diffuse residential built area, the second an existing farmhouse no longer productive with residential functions. The main design strategy’s goal was to reduce water withdrawal from the aqueduct and reuse part of the outgoing water to limit the discharge into the sewage system as much as possible.

Building-integrated agriculture can enhance urban food resilience when a greenhouse allows production during the cold season, especially in facade greenhouse retrofits on existing buildings, which should balance solar access, solar gains, and indoor comfort. This study presents a parametric workflow to generate and compare facade-integrated agricultural devices for a mid-20th-century social-housing block in South-East Milan, combining geometric reconstruction, regulatory constraints, and performance-driven form finding. The work presents a procedure that includes multi- and single-objective optimisation targeting winter solar access, summer overheating control, and sun-hours availability, and identifies the best option through greenhouse indoor climate simulation. The Pareto front was used to filter candidate solutions, and ANOVA and Tukey HSD tests were then used to compare them. Correlation analysis was used to assess the consistency of shape-driven effects across seasonal conditions. Under uniform operational assumptions (high operable glazing fraction and dynamic interior shading activated by facade irradiance), the choices were then evaluated in an indoor energy model. According to the comparison, several optimised geometries perform about the same across goals. The process allows for a clear, repeatable selection of retrofit envelope options that meet energy, thermal comfort, and agricultural production aspects.