Mapping Public Space: Activating Outdoor Climate Control

This essay explores the phenomenon of the city mapping of the environmentally sustainable and resilient data and parameters relating to outdoor space in the urban area, adopting the complexity typical of an interdisciplinary perspective as an epistemological tool for a renewed exchange of knowledge between urban geography and climatic surveys within the area of studies of the architecture of intermediate spaces. The purpose is to analyze and explore the information/energy/microclimate/public spaces/buildings exchanges in contemporary urban basins and particularly in the historic and consolidated city. The path in this sense is structured around different lines of research dedicated to geography and to urban studies, cartography, analysis of the microclimate, and the performance of materials and components, until the planning of new scenarios is achieved. It starts from the assumption that the legibility and comprehension of the data of the urban space is an open question not only for academic studies, but also for all those whose daily experience is defined by typically urban spatiality, practices, and rhythms. In this sense, the notion of city mapping is rapidly gaining ground in the literature on architectural sustainability, and, with it, frameworks for assessing and configuring scenarios have developed that represent an effective way to integrate the issues related to microclimate and to resilience into the process of designing the city’s intermediate spaces. The purpose of this essay is not, however, to explain only the importance of collecting and mapping data in research operations on outdoor urban space, but, to a certain degree, it aims to offer a critical vantage point on the assumption of study parameters and on the definition of possible future planning scenarios. Deeply understanding the meaning of collecting data means knowing how to choose the parameters that then determine the solutions to be tried out in the various contexts, taking due account of the setting’s tangible and intangible components, long-standing performance demands, and demands for services for society at large, articulated for specific needs. Intermediate urban space, especially in historic and/or consolidated fabrics, is in fact a complex architectural/spatial situation with many different faces that it is important to identify. It is precisely this complexity that makes the research so interesting on how this situation structures the possible configurations of the planning scenario – configurations that are environmentally sustainable and resilient to the climate changes taking place. What relevant aspects of mapping, then, are highlighted in the most recent research? And what is their most innovative function that may be gleaned from the literature and from sectoral policies? In other words, how is the urban basin represented, and with what intent in terms of planning is it represented in that manner in the studies on environmental sustainability and resilience?