The increased effects of climate change in the built environment require a rapid and effective response to adapt urban settlements to the main impacts related to heatwave, extreme precipitation, sea-level rise, and so on. At the same time, there is not much time to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to climate change and limit the mean temperature of the planet within the 1.5 °C imposed by the Paris Agreement. In this perspective, cities around the world have a key role toward carbon neutral and resilient targets. In parallel in the last years, we are witnessing the impacts of a big amount of data and information available at the city scale. There are many data coming from different databases that can be processed and managed to support the urban climate action planned and designed by decision-makers and urban practitioners, for example, to assess the carbon emission of the building sector or to simulate the effects of extreme precipitation or urban heat island and consequence behavior of the built environment. In this scenario, in the last years, among many different digital enable technologies available in the Industry 4.0 ambit, it has gained more attention in the field of urban planning and urban design the digital twin concept that could synthesize in a digital representation of the real-world data and information flow that could exchange from the physical side to digital representation and vice versa. The aim of the paper is to analyze the urban digital twin developed in last years in Europe to evaluate if and how they consider the climate change issue, in order to understand the state of the art, the applications developed for climate change and which is the level of experimentation in order to study and develop guidelines to build urban digital twin as a support tool for a climate-neutral and resilient city.

Cities worldwide have established plans and policies to achieve climate-neutral and climate-resilient objectives in recent decades. Researches have demonstrated that Climate Change Action Plans generally fail to include mitigation and adaptation approaches in their planning processes, despite their importance. A proposed multilevel assessment of Climate Change Action Plans, urban regeneration, and building projects was used to analyze the ten cities most sustainable in terms of developing environmental strategies, including local climate action to determine the degree of adaptation and mitigation integration in cutting-edge contexts and to identify measures that show synergies and co-benefits for urban design practices. Climate Change Action Plans, urban regeneration and building projects have been evaluated through scoring methods to determine firstly the level of integration among adaptation and mitigation and secondly the most used urban design solutions that addresses both approaches. Almost all of Climate Change Action Plans have "moderate" and "early" integration, with the most advanced in North American cities including Toronto, Montreal, New York, and San Francisco. Climate Change Action Plans partly influence urban regeneration projects. Among the cities studied, Royal Seaport and Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm stand out as the most advanced in terms of including measures for both mitigating and adapting to climate change, as well as the extent of activities carried out. North American building projects have the highest adaptation and mitigation strategies. Climate Change Action Plans, urban regeneration initiatives, and building projects analyzed have displayed measures to include both climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation benefits into urban design.

The objective of this paper is to present a methodology for the integration of a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) microclimate simulation and a Geographic Information System (GIS). The first workflow involves the attribution of spatial coordinates to the point data extracted from the CFD, the implementation of an SQLite database, and the connection to the database to visualise and use information on environmental and comfort variables. The second workflow involves georeferencing the CFD raster output, attributing an ID to the point data, creating a point grid in a GIS environment, and merging these with the point data on the microclimate. For demonstration purposes, the methodology is tested on a real case study using ENVI-met and ArcGIS Pro.

The original article was published with an error to the corresponding author’s name. The author group and the publisher request the correct name, Mar

The transition towards circular practices in the construction sector requires integrated approaches addressing both material resource procurement and the fragmentation of local stakeholder networks. This study presents the ACT-FLOW Framework, a multi-level approach enabling territorial circular processes by integrating actor networks and material flows. The framework comprises three interconnected levels (strategies, processes, and indicators) supporting the definition, implementation, and evaluation of circular practices across building and territorial scales with an iterative refinement phase. Methodologically, it was developed through a Design Science Research approach (DSR) articulated into four steps: (1) define the scope and boundaries; (2) develop a knowledge base; (3) structure the framework and its components; and (4) validate and apply it to a real case, the Circular Design Polito Lab, a research infrastructure currently under development by the Politecnico di Torino (Italy). The results demonstrate how the framework supports stakeholder coordination, structures circular workflows, and enhances circular performance monitoring. The primary limitation is that the case study has not yet been realized; consequently, it is not feasible to conduct an ex post but only an ex ante evaluation of the results. Future research will assess the framework’s capacity to foster ecosystemic conditions for circular construction practices through its longitudinal application across project phases.