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Towards Urban Adaptation
Adapting to CC can be considered a “new” theme on the planning stage. The need
to address the CC from a point of view of adaptation and not just of mitigation represents a substantial leap in scale, from a global logic for mitigation, to an urban and
strongly localized one for adaptation. Adaptation is an urban and local issue, since
it is very specifically the cities and the people that must find their “way” to adapt to
the effects of CC that impact them and there are no appropriate policies and adaptive measures that are suitable to be applied anytime and in all contexts. Adaptation
is a complex mechanism that is based primarily on the geomorphologic specificities
of the place and the local community that lives in it with its customs and traditions,
but the economy, infrastructure and flows that characterize it must necessarily also
be taken into account. Adaptation is therefore primarily a spatial, territorial concept,
which cannot forcefully enter as a new standard in the elaboration of the theories
and tools of the plan and the project of urban and territorial planning.
The need to face CC at an urban scale can be attributed to diverse considerations,
that should be addressed in an integrative way. First, as partially highlighted in the
previous section, CC became an issue in urban agendas in response to the necessity
to face urban vulnerability, defined as “the degree to which people, places, institutions and sectors are susceptible to, and unable to cope with, climate change impacts
and hazards” (UN-HABITAT 2014). The higher vulnerability of urban contexts can
be attributed to a series of factors, such as “their heavy reliance on interconnected
networked infrastructure, high population density, large numbers of poor and elderly
people and major concentration of material and cultural asserts” (Carter et al. 2015:
4, see also EEA 2010). With this respect, a further consideration concerns climate
change and risk perception: also due to the factors mentioned above, the impacts of
climate change are mainly experienced at a urban and local scale. Secondly, the
emergence of urban CC issues is related to the need to limit the urban drivers that
cause pollution. Currently, cities are the main producers of greenhouse gases, and
this incidence will steadily increase with the growing urbanization trend (UN 2008).
At the conceptual level, adaptation would adopt an integrated theoretical framework capable of integrating Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk
Reduction (DRR) also considering their relevance for urban planning.
A New Role for Planning
The marginalization of territorial and urban planning in recent years has become an
objective and consolidated fact. The reasons for this have been identified in the
inability to understand how the city and the territory in general were changing (yesterday and today), in the progressive loss of a complex design idea in which space
and society, physical and socio-economical dimensions, general concepts and specific action plans, interactions between scales and times interact constantly
Planning and Climate Change: Concepts, Approaches, Design
Towards Urban Adaptation
Adapting to CC can be considered a “new” theme on the planning stage. The need
to address the CC from a point of view of adaptation and not just of mitigation represents a substantial leap in scale, from a global logic for mitigation, to an urban and
strongly localized one for adaptation. Adaptation is an urban and local issue, since
it is very specifically the cities and the people that must find their “way” to adapt to
the effects of CC that impact them and there are no appropriate policies and adaptive measures that are suitable to be applied anytime and in all contexts. Adaptation
is a complex mechanism that is based primarily on the geomorphologic specificities
of the place and the local community that lives in it with its customs and traditions,
but the economy, infrastructure and flows that characterize it must necessarily also
be taken into account. Adaptation is therefore primarily a spatial, territorial concept,
which cannot forcefully enter as a new standard in the elaboration of the theories
and tools of the plan and the project of urban and territorial planning.
The need to face CC at an urban scale can be attributed to diverse considerations,
that should be addressed in an integrative way. First, as partially highlighted in the
previous section, CC became an issue in urban agendas in response to the necessity
to face urban vulnerability, defined as “the degree to which people, places, institutions and sectors are susceptible to, and unable to cope with, climate change impacts
and hazards” (UN-HABITAT 2014). The higher vulnerability of urban contexts can
be attributed to a series of factors, such as “their heavy reliance on interconnected
networked infrastructure, high population density, large numbers of poor and elderly
people and major concentration of material and cultural asserts” (Carter et al. 2015:
4, see also EEA 2010). With this respect, a further consideration concerns climate
change and risk perception: also due to the factors mentioned above, the impacts of
climate change are mainly experienced at a urban and local scale. Secondly, the
emergence of urban CC issues is related to the need to limit the urban drivers that
cause pollution. Currently, cities are the main producers of greenhouse gases, and
this incidence will steadily increase with the growing urbanization trend (UN 2008).
At the conceptual level, adaptation would adopt an integrated theoretical framework capable of integrating Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk
Reduction (DRR) also considering their relevance for urban planning.
A New Role for Planning
The marginalization of territorial and urban planning in recent years has become an
objective and consolidated fact. The reasons for this have been identified in the
inability to understand how the city and the territory in general were changing (yesterday and today), in the progressive loss of a complex design idea in which space
and society, physical and socio-economical dimensions, general concepts and specific action plans, interactions between scales and times interact constantly
Planning and Climate Change: Concepts, Approaches, Design