Transferability of greencities experiences for sustainable urban planning

During the last decades new developments, retrofitting and urban regeneration projects in most of European green cities have been designed according to high level of Urban Design Solutions (UDS) such as green spaces networks, low-carbon mobility systems, mixed land uses, public facilities/services and new jobs. Integration of these UDS to water/waste and renewable energy management systems has shown an effective contribution to urban and environmental quality and sustainability. Even though these successfully experiences provided a considerable amount of valuable UDS, their suitability to be transferred in urban contexts characterized by different environmental, morphological, socio-economic and cultural conditions has not been systematically investigated. This paper proposes a method for evaluating the transferability of several UDS that have been applied in a set of fifteen European green cities to urban contexts of Southern Italy, where socio-economic, environmental, geographical, and cultural conditions are different. The method is based on three different steps. First, UDS are identified and grouped within a matrix in three strategic categories (procedures and economic aspects, urban quality, energy and environment). The second step checks the suitability of these different UDS to be transferred according to six different criteria: climate and geography, mobility/green/facilities equipment, water/waste/energy grids equipment, norms and regulations, urban management policies, social and cultural aspects. The third step is the evaluation of the transferability of UDS based on a survey conducted through web-interviews to Italian national experts in the field of urban planning. Contrary to the expectations, results show that a very high percentage of UDS could be transferred to the southern Italy contexts and that the transferability is more influenced by lack of urban management policies than climatic or geogaphical features.