The concept of ‘urban proximity’, which has returned to the limelight with the promotion of the ‘15-min city’ developed and re-proposed for the post-COVID city, cannot simply be associated with the concept of physical proximity to the essential activities of daily life but must concern reinforcement of the social interactions that some places are able to activate better than others. This article focuses on the regeneration of Italian council housing neighbourhoods that lack relational proximity, even when functional proximity has been painstakingly achieved. It describes the fundamental steps of a working method that aims to strengthen the ‘relational performance’ of public spaces, using an interdisciplinary cognitive and assessment process and co-planning with the local community based on the issues of inclusiveness, safety, and climate vulnerability. The experimentation made in an economic and social housing district in a city in Central Italy revealed the need to ‘hook’ the space node onto the node of local capacities and resources, recognizing the local community as the bearer of desires, capacities, and planning will, capable of orienting and prefiguring the complex process of regeneration in the post-COVID city.

The aim of this paper is to identify a parameterization method that considers existing connections and relationships between traditional indicators of environmental sustainability as a step in combating climate change via urban strategies. A typical Mediterranean city (Ancona, Italy) is investigated with a multi-objective optimization platform called modeFrontier, which uses Pareto optimality. This concept formalizes the trade-off between a given set of mutually contradicting objectives, such as high thermal comfort and low energy consumption, to identify a set of Pareto solutions. A solution is Pareto optimal when it is not possible to improve one objective without deteriorating at least one of the others. The optimization process employs given constraints (for example, meteorological scenarios with high temperature and low winds or morphological building parameters), custom procedural algorithms (recursive algorithms to generate the set of all non-dominated objective parameters), and genetic algorithms (inspired by the natural selection process) to examine a wide urban space and identify interesting relationships among relevant variables for typical summer scenarios. Multi-objective optimizers involve many evaluations of two objectives (i.e., energy consumption and thermal comfort in this study) while considering many analytical constraints. This approach entails a considerably more exhaustive search of environmental variables that can help the urban planning process to mitigate the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Three quantitative metrics related to urban morphology and local climate conditions, as well as a thermal comfort indicator (the predicted mean vote), are defined and applied to Ancona to examine the potential for new sustainability in urban design. The results show that two parameters examined—compacity and a building-scale energy indicator—can offer insight when designing comfortable cities, while a citywide energy indicator shows that it is more difficult to find optimal solutions when dealing with the city as a whole. The research serves as a proof-of-concept and the possibility of identifying some local strategies in order to combat the UHI is verified.

The “Joint Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans” (Joint SECAPs) introduced by the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) are voluntary tools that favour a joint approach to energy planning and climate change mitigation/adaptation among municipalities in the same territorial area. The goal is to obtain joint results that are more effective and advantageous than those that can be achieved by the individual municipalities with respect to local climate change adaptation and mitigation policies. This article assesses their effectiveness in Italy. Six different experiences conducted mostly in small and medium municipal networks are compared, verifying the advantages and critical points in the different phases of building and implementing adaptation measures. A list of recommendations/objectives emerges from these experiences to guide the joint construction of adaptation measures, which may be implemented through multi-level participatory governance that encourages experimentation and innovation on the local level and develops synergy with large-scale policies and plans.

This paper presents the results of theoretical and applied research that employs methodological experimentation in a project for the protection and integrated transformation of the downtown area of the city of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. The particular nature of this case relates to two factors: (a) strategies and policies to protect and enhance the cultural heritage as a driver for tourism and the cultural development of the entire Emirate, from archaeological goods to the urban fabrics in historical centres (Sharjah and Korfakkhan), in contrast to the surrounding Emirates; and (b) the client’s request to define guidelines to manage the urban cultural heritage during a time of transition while awaiting the results of UNESCO candidacy. This unique fact denotes a sensitivity and long-term policies regarding the cultural heritage which views the recovery of the urban historical heritage, assuming the cultural component as the fourth dimension of sustainability. The methodological approach, the results of the research, and design are organized on the dual urban and building scale to understand the structure and elements of the historical centre. The actions and interventions are differentiated with respect to urban fabric, building, archaeological good, and landscape, and translate the strategies of the guidelines into short-/mid-/long-term design actions.

The success of a food product is also the success of the territory that produced it. Based on this idea, we address the connection between landscape and quality wine in order to promote new sustainable development of rural territories. We use regulatory plans for ‘Wine Cities’ of Bomporto, Pramaggiore and San Martino sulla Marrucina (Italy) to highlight the ability of new urban-planning instruments to deal with different aspects relating to quality food and agriculture. The goal of the plans is to improve and renew the rural territory. Based on the Wine City Guidelines, the local urban plans for these towns provide useful indications, suggestions and rules for territorial improvement and transformation by way of enhancing the rural landscape and quality wine production. In promoting this new type of development, these plans encourage the direct involvement of local communities and manufacturing companies in sharing and promoting common objectives and development strategies.

Urban green planning in Europe is of crucial importance for the sustainability of cities. Despite the existence of numerous best practices, in Italy the integration between green plans and urban planning tools still presents difficulties. This study focused on an analysis of Italian case studies that have engaged in innovative urban planning, assigning green areas a strategic role in the development of cities. The comparative analysis involved the green plans of Torino and Bolzano and the local urban plans of Prato and Bologna. The selection of cases was based on a multifaceted evaluation framework encompassing reference regulatory context, plan nature, environmental characterisation, vision and main objectives, priorities and implementation tools, communication and participation, and monitoring and management. Analysis of these case studies led to the identification of best practices for integrating human and environmental dimensions in local urban planning. However, the results indicate that integration of urban greening and local planning policies is frequently impeded by regulatory discrepancies and the varying impact capabilities of urban planning instruments. Despite the limited nature of the sample analysed, the study proposes a model of synergy between urban greening and local planning, suggesting an opportunity to create innovative interpretative and evaluative criteria for regulatory plans.