Universities play a crucial role in the short-term implementation of education for sustainable development goals (SDGs). The fourth SDG aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. Indeed, SDG4 is not intended as a goal in itself, but rather, a tool to achieve different goals and explore the best practices, via deductive-theoretical or inductive-experiential methods. Still, current literature on education for SDGs does not always consider the infrastructural and practical factors affecting the success or the failure of the practices mentioned above. The main purpose of this paper is to organize and describe a set of ongoing education for sustainability strategies that took place from 2016 to 2019 in Italian universities. Eighteen best practices have been collected after a national call by the Italian Network of Sustainable Universities (RUS), that aimed to map the current landscape of SDGs-related actions. Data have been analyzed based on the qualitative description provided by each university, according to four criteria: trigger, course type, approach (top-down/bottom-up) and declared mission. Results are depicted as a map of the current Italian higher education system, where a predominant mission (teaching) and a prevalent driver (top-down) have been found as the frequent features of SDGs educational initiatives. Further developments highlight the value of this first country-wide mapping of the Italian Higher Education Institutions implementing SDGs in their activities, that can avoid the isolation of individual experiences and, most importantly, can suggest some comparability and transferability criteria for similar cases.

The objective of this paper is to explore the role of urban codes in the transformation processes of the ordinary city. By focusing on the case study of the City of Turin, the article investigates the relationship between the regulatory system and urban form through the “window” element, providing suggestions for acting on building planning and regulation tools. In particular, the object of the research is the set of rules relating to the performance of buildings with respect to the supply of daylight and its implementation with the environmental regulation system. The paper proposes an integration to the Building Regulations, with the aim of reorienting the use of rules both as control tools during the project (and not exclusively as ex post verification), and as devices capable of enabling ordinary transformations of the city.

Within the debate around urban commons in Italy, it has been argued that the overlapping of public property and common use is needed in order to set a common. This article questions that perspective through the case of the masterplan for the Cavallerizza Reale complex in Turin (2016), by considering space as a key factor in the understanding of a bundle of rights.The masterplan proposes the reorganisation of the right of use to establish a specific urban space as a common, through different tools acting in the fields of property regime, planning regulation and preservation regulation.

Is it possible to represent exhaustively the design scales (Revel, 2006) of a thirty-years long urban transformation in just one scheme? Is it possible to consider such a thick description (Geertz, 1973) as autonomous and analytically useful? The following scheme is an attempt to explore the answers at these questions through an overview of the Paris’s les Halles saga during the Seventies and the Eighties, as a result of a three-year research Even if the scheme may appear obscure to those who...