About

12-13 October 2020 / SAVE THE DATE!
Meet the team and the Scientific Committee
The symposium will be held at Politecnico di Milano, in Milan, Italy. 

The topic of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) has been lately cultivating interests from different scholars, urban planning practitioners and policymakers. This symposium aims at bridging the gap between science and practice of getting NBS implemented in place-based contexts as a novel greening strategy and eventually an effective tool to adapt and mitigate climate change pressures.

The symposium is expected to bring a coherent and well-grounded (both empirically and conceptually) collection of scientific articles that cover fresh and novel insights to urban debates on design and planning theory, policy and practice around NBS. The current themes of the symposium cover the whole procedural gaps of greening cities strategies that are currently fore fronting the re-shaping of many urban fabrics nowadays. In specific we aim to address the following aspects:

Firstly, we tackle the urban greening strategies related to physical and urban design, land use cover and land use availability. Those greening strategies put in place are strongly tied to urban and regional spatial scales of implementation; nonetheless, the practice hand side emphasizes the lack of coordination between land use planning and pressuring environmental planning strategies. This gap is often addressed in climate risk planning adaptation and mitigation measures but deficient on the urban planning resilience planning measures due to authorities’ silos and mismatching urban governance mechanisms.

That led to our second question, that a strong emphasis on NBS viability for implementation got hindrances on the governance scale and lacks a strong functional model in order to “make it work”. A big tranche of this pitfall is due to the lack of capacities and communication between municipality departments and each other’s, as well as, the need to raise awareness on how the NBS operate on a day-to day activity. Hence, the capacity building and awareness activities result as one major need in cities decision-making processes to make NBS implementation more inclusive and managerially shared.

Thirdly, the pressuring climate change challenges led cities local governments and urban alliances to work cooperatively to reduce the risk and downscale the temperature increase effects; however, NBS still lack a binding policy to be majorly advanced in urban contexts implementation. Furthermore, experimental decision-making mechanisms in cities paved the way to think on layered multi-stakeholder scales, that help the implementation pathway to spread out from small NBS actions forward to a wider-urban scale intervention in cities.

Lastly, one important aspect of innovation in NBS implementation nowadays is its inclusivity and its relatedness to citizen-centered approaches for implementation in urban living labs (ULL). The notion is that ULLs allow a flexible structural pathway and include a variety of sleeve tools to bring everyone one board. Lessons in this section would mainly address the successful case studies from physical or digital ULLs experiences of implementing NBS in urban regeneration processes.

In sum, the symposium touches base on many aspects related to NBS conceptualization, implementation and up-scaling in cities. The finality of our exploration is to find clues helping us to critically understand and interpret how greening cities is affecting urban shaping, both from a morphological and governance point of view.


Interested Participants to attend should register here for free, and send an abstract submission to the email greeningcities@polimi.it see Submission details section.


The Team

Greening Cities – Shaping Cities is organised by the LabSimUrb ‘Fausto Curti’ research group at the Dept. of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) of Politecnico di Milano . The research group is also involved in the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme funded project ‘CLEVER Cities’ more specifically in the context of the Milan municipality and the Co-creation Guidance and Framework.

Organizing Committee/

Dr. Israa Mahmoud
Prof. Eugenio Morello
Dr. Giuseppe Salvia