Ricerc@Sapienza

Cities consume 75 per cent of global primary energy and emit above 50 per cent of the world’s total greenhouse gases. For all their differences, Mediterranean cities share some of today’s most urgent urban challenges, such as climate change, environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity, sprawl and gentrification, migration and marginalisation, as well as shrinking economies and political turmoil. Policies at all levels call for more sustainable urbanisation models levering on Green Infrastructure (GI) and nature-based solutions essential in supporting energy transition.

Environmental risks such as failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation—which is
considered the most potentially impactful risk and the third most likely, with water crises,
biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse (WEF 2016: 6)—are rising up the list of worldwide
concerns.
Landscape architects, and other professionals from related disciplines, are deemed
to contribute with “adaptive” architectural and urban design levering on nature-based
solutions and appropriate technologies1 (Schumacher 1974; Thormann 1979) in order to