The concept of resilience in urban design and decision-making is principally focused on change instead of resistance over an adaptive process. For cities, this concept in a broader scale means how to withstand unforeseen events that will fundamentally amend the city’s wellbeing, rather than being stabilized and protected. The same concept is applicable for outdoor comfort as an adaptive approach to compensate extreme heat waves and health risk conditions. This chapter presents methods, tools, and applications to enhance urban resilience at a micro scale looking for correlations between environmental factors and human behavior in terms of outdoor comfort.

Environmental data acquisition tools are broadly used for climate monitoring and urban comfort assessment followed by data mining and sensing techniques for putting into evidence the relationship between environmental qualities of urban spaces and human well-being. Within this context, an environmental toolkit is a fundamental tool to evaluate transient outdoor comfort. This study explains the prototyping and validation of a mobile environmental sensor kit. The results show the prototype has reasonable accuracy despite its affordability with respect to industrial sensors.

In architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, entangled multiscale and multidomain, or compound, sustainability problems and associated design requirements are becoming rapidly more demanding, complex, and interdisciplinary due to demographic, social, economic, environmental, and technological changes. This places considerable pressure on developing adequate pedagogical approaches to provide the next generation of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers with the knowledge, approaches, and skills to meet these challenges. This article discusses an attempt to develop an adequate pedagogy for a research-integrated master-level design studio along a multimethod approach. Key concepts, approaches, and methods are discussed, along with selected studio projects and a follow-up master thesis project. The projects are examined in terms of their responses to the themes, concepts, approaches, and methods of the pedagogical approach. Finally, further questions concerning the development of the portrayed pedagogical approach are discussed.

Daylight has always had a relevant part in design for architects and engineers since really ancient times. Even if light had such an\ud important role in the design process, new methods for quantifying more precisely lighting levels have been discovered just in the\ud last decade. In this research, issues related to daylight in office buildings - due to volume, structure, and orientation - have a key\ud role. Lighting levels in workspaces are fundamental in order to estimate and optimize dimensions for an office building; the depth\ud of the building in relation to the facade is one of the most common problems that always represent a struggle for designers that\ud have to find a meeting point between intentions and performance. The research is particularly focused on the optimization of\ud existing building shapes that, in accordance with new facades, optimize natural lighting levels in office spaces. The improvement\ud of indoor comfort regarding natural lighting levels is nowadays one of the main topics in retrofitting interventions, especially in\ud the case of office buildings environments where orientation, context and functions significantly change in relation to the orientation.\ud The reduction of the thermal energy demand has been deeply investigated and the challenge to have nZEB retrofitting involves the\ud reduction of energy for artificial light. Could the building depth change accordingly to a specific luminance level? How does the\ud spatial quality of working spaces increase, if the building shape changes to get as much daylight as possible? Today, simulation\ud software gives us the possibility to obtain precise information relatively to each environment on every single floor at any time of\ud the year; the precision of the analysis results mostly depend on how accurate the study model is, and on how the settings have been\ud given. Through the use of parametric software such as Grasshopper, together with potentialities offered by Ladybug and Honeybee,\ud it is possible to obtain detailed natural lighting parameters and to explore the field of environmental analysis. In particular, starting\ud from daylight autonomy simulations, an expansion based on daylight autonomy values has been made: the higher the percentage,\ud the more the building extends its area. The idea is to get an extension of useful working space just in those areas in which luminance\ud levels are acceptable for a longer time while, at the same time, buildings get slimmer where natural light conditions are worse. The\ud concept has been tested on a study case in Rome, more specifically to the Ligini’s Towers in the rationalist neighborhood of EUR

Urban Microclimate Canopy is a digitally fabricated fiber glass structure supporting climbing plants in order to explore new ways of integrating vegetation in densely built urban environments. A prototype was designed and manufactured in the context of an interdisciplinary studio with master’s students following an approach of research by design. Varying the assembly of winding frames and fiber weaving syntax generates diverse geometric shape and structural performance. For two short-term exhibitions, ivy plants were temporarily installed in the structure. This first step was followed with a reflection of systematic integration of the growth processes of climbing plants and parametric design. An iterative solution is given, consisting of a feedback loop linking the design of the technical structure, the simulation of plant growth, and the simulation of the environmental effects of the hybrid structure. To achieve this a novel framework for simulating twining plant’s growth on network-like structures is presented: external stimuli define a cone-shaped circumnutation space (searching space model) which results in a climbing path (climbing steps model). The framework is constructed to integrate improved individual functions (such as stimuli of circumnutation) for better simulation results. To acquire more knowledge about interactions between the plants and the fiber structure, the prototype was installed permanently and planted with three different climbing plants, representing different climbing mechanisms.