To rapidly adapt cities to the growing impacts of climate change, the open space system can play important functions as climate regulators and accelerators of sustainable urban development. To this end, this paper aims to provide a methodology that classifies open spaces on the basis of their physical characteristics and their contribution to climate vulnerability and articulates them according to the costs required for adaptation and the benefits brought. The method was applied to the city of Naples, which is an interesting case study due to its heterogeneous territory in terms of geomorphological features, such as hilly conformation and coastal location, and urban assets characterised by densely built urban fabrics with different distributions and kinds of activities. The results showed that (i) the open spaces with both low thermal and hydraulic performance are predominantly located in the peripheral part of the city, and (ii) the central area is strongly characterised by this dual issue. The latter output confirms the need to update the transformation rules of high historical-architectural value areas by introducing new resilience requirements criteria that cities are asked to have.

This study aims to contribute to theoretical debate concerning urban planning, highlighting the need for a renewal of approaches and tools that could allow for the achievement of urban smartness. The concept of urban sustainability is evolving, also in relation to the incoming world of “smart cities,” and it should be related to a systemic vision of the city. Referring to a systemic approach for the study of urban phenomena, sustainability can be considered as a target condition that cities have to achieve in order to contrast “urban entropy” and behave as smart cities. In this regard, our study starts from the premise that entropy is a negative state, which can affect the urban system in all its components. Among these components, the social subsystem can play a strategic role and some urban functions (such as the components of the functional subsystem) can be designated as “driving functions” that are able to lead the urban system towards a sustainable and smarter state of equilibrium. This equilibrium, though not static, can provide the efficiency of the system. Since tourism interests several aspects and sectors, it can be considered as one of the forces that, if properly controlled (i.e., by integrating it into the process of evolution of the system), would positively influence the evolution of the urban system. The application of the theoretical framework refers to the social (active) component of tourism, represented by the tourist flows that move inside the physical subsystem and can be traced through the data they disseminate by the use of their personal devices, with the aim of individuating the urban zones where the load of tourism concentrates. These areas can be marked as the ones urban planners and decision-makers have to first monitor in order to control the general state of the urban system equilibrium.

The phenomenon of rapid and unplanned urban growth, driven by the migration from rural to urban areas, has hindered healthy urbanization and undermined sustainable development. Sustainability assessment has become one of the popular terms in different fields, especially in architecture and urban planning, and world leading urban sustainability assessment tools have been proposed. Each tool is based on a set of weighted evaluation parameters, related to some main sustainability dimension (environment, economy, society …), and requires to reach a sustainability threshold. In this paper, after a brief review of the state of the art, a linear optimization model is presented, which aimed to find the minimum set of parameters needed to guarantee the sustainability threshold for each tool, taking into account all the sustainability dimensions. The model has been positively experienced with 144 input parameters belonging to five assessment tools. The tests prove that this procedure is able to summarize and overcome the choices made by the certifying bodies. Indeed the proposed optimization model selected 26 parameters of the five tools. The majority of the selected parameters are related to the environmental emergency that in recent decades has characterized—and still affects—urban systems.

During the next three decades the “grey” segment of population will grow by nearly 80% in many developed countries such as Italy. The structure and the design of outdoor spaces and the related walkable network can improve the quality of life of old population, making it “active” by promoting social engagement and health-based activities. In this perspective, this paper provides a GIS-based methodology that, starting from the physical characteristics of the pedestrian network and the urban context influencing the choice of a route, is aimed at defining the pedestrian network suitable for the elderly for achieving some of the main activities of their interest. This goal represents a step of the MOBILAGE project, aiming to define a decision support tool for public administrations to quality of life of elderly.