The use of green in changing cities. An integrated approach to planning the urban landscape with green technologies

The growth of the world’s population is a central topic in the international political agenda and subject of intense attention for associations and research institutes involved in pursuing sustainable development on the planet. The UN informs us that by the year 2100 the world population will reach 11.2 billion and it points out how more than 50% of this amount will be amassed in urban agglomerations. These forecasts should be accompanied though, by those related to the constant worsening of climatic conditions and the consequential effects on the territory, as urban areas are the part of the planet where you will pay most the social costs of global warming and so it seems increasingly urgent to approach the issue of adapting to climate change (Musco, Zanchini, 2013). Given these worldwide growing Megacities and overpopulation the need for a rise in the percentage of green space in cities is beyond question for various reasons - regarding ecology, city climate, energetic and social considerations. The physiological and psychological connection between the human being and natural elements – be it plants, water, sunlight or animals – is a topic still to be researched in depth. A lot of scientific surveys from the last few decades deal with buildings physics or morphologic properties of plants. In times of rising importance of efficiency and productivity the impact of said elements as an asset perceived as an improvement of the quality of life (Pauli, Scheuermann, 2017), on behaviour and health and therefore on the individual and social wellbeing of a city’s inhabitants is of utmost importance for the development of a thriving sociality. The possibilities of implementations in order to reach this aim are manifold in nearly every scale from the urban landscape up to technological solutions in buildings. In order to achieve sustainable and practical solutions, an approach from these two opposite sides is taken, searching for possibilities of interlacing, overlapping and enhancing planning structures on the whole. This contribution intends to discuss the possibility of an integrated approach of urban planning and architecture technology, considering the use of greenery to be an indispensable element for the requalification of urban landscape suffering from the effects of climate change. There will be proposed a comparative analysis of several case studies in order to define sustainable design actions that are capable of increasing urban resilience, as well as the quality of public space through the definition of “best practices”.