Vertical Greenery Systems for Building Stock

The 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development calls for strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation. In this sense, greening strategies can help achieve this goal as well as improve the environmental, psychological, and social quality of cities. Nature Based Solutions (NBS) constitute one of the strategies that address both adaptation and mitigation of climate change. In the urban context, NBS are translated into Green Infrastructures (GI) i.e. greening of private and public land with trees and hedges, Green Roofs (GR) and Vertical Greenery System (VGS). The greening systems when applied on new buildings, for instance Bosco verticale (Stefano Boeri, 2009 - 14) or Caixa Forum (Herzog & de Meuron, 2003 - 08), just to mention the most famous, became one of those requirements which the design in based on; instead, when we deal with urban regeneration and building renovation/retrofitting design it is necessary to choose the greening strategy that accounts the constraints dictated by existing buildings related to geometry, load bearing structure, architectural and technological aspects. This study aims to evaluate the applicability of VGS on the existing building stock and their role in summer comfort, starting from the classification of building types used in the most recent architectural projects. The study provides a premise for the transfer of this technology as a useful strategy in greening interventions on the building stock.