Complessità e cambiamento climatico: il ruolo dell’ambiente costruito ed i metodi per considerare le incertezze e molteplici obiettivi // Complexity and climate change: The role of the built environment and methods to consider uncertainties and multiple objectives

Climate change, economic fluctuation, social distress, and pandemics are just an example of unpredictable factors challenging the built environment and its components. These exogenous uncertain factors need to be addressed within the planning process in addition to the many inherent, intertwined, and complex elements that compose and regulate the anthropized environment. In the following years, planners and decision-makers will have the challenging role of conceiving the best strategies to cope and thrive in the face of unforeseen events and changing climatic conditions. In order to do so, new methods and tools should be tested to be integrated into traditional design practices. This paper proposes two examples at different scales to address complexity and uncertainty in the built environment. First, we provide a framing of state of the art for methodologies applied in the case studies. Then, we frame the case study area at the urban scale and analyze the possible urban development under uncertain conditions through explorative scenarios that provide a “what if” narrative that can be used by planners or decision-makers to reason the best option for the future. In the second example, we scale down at the building level and analyse how multi-objective optimization algorithms can facilitate the design of active and passive strategies to improve the energy performance of buildings, reducing their environmental impact while containing investment and energy costs. The two case-study applications demonstrate the potentiality of the proposed methods and tools. However, more research is still needed to consider them in an integrated approach to effectively address the complexity of a design problem, taking into account its uncertainties and multiple objectives.