Key Theoretical Lenses for Climate Equity and Resilience in the Built Environment. A Conceptual Article

As per the Sustainable Development Goals and the European Climate Action, enhancing the resilience, livability, and sustainability of cities may be achieved primarily through mitigation and adaptation to climate change. Cities are a major worry, especially for those who are more vulnerable, as the effects of climate change are escalating problems for urban regions, such as harsher and more frequent heat waves and urban flooding. One of the planning paradigms that helps engineers, architects, and urban planners create resilient communities and lessen the effects of climate change is known as regenerative design, or RD. Nevertheless, a number of restrictions currently impede the RD’s advancement in light of climate change. By connecting various spatial scales, from the urban/neighborhood to the building scale, and incorporating techniques and tools from different perspectives, such as Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU), this conceptual contribution seeks to overcome the constraints of RD by forging a novel and comprehensive outline and framework for just and equitable, climate-proof, cities. The amalgamation of diverse disciplines and scales will provide an all-encompassing array of instruments and methodologies to facilitate the following: (i) address the complexity deriving from the many interrelated factors composing the built environment; (ii) tackling numerous environmental, equity, and justice concerns; (iii) formulating a framework for implementing a flexible plan for future-proofing urban areas. This conceptual research is innovative since it attempts to overcome the operational limitations of consolidated paradigms and opens up a new field of application for the DMDU in the urban context.