Building Greener Cities Together: Urban Afforestation Requires Multiple Skills to Address Social, Ecological, and Climate Challenges.

Urban afforestation is increasingly regarded as a key strategy for fostering biodiversity to restore and enhance the ecosystem services needed to counteract the effects of climate change in built-up areas. In Italy, several experimental afforestation projects have been launched as part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), focusing on cities or metropolitan areas such as Milan, Rome, Pistoia and Campobasso. These projects follow a multidisciplinary approach, integrating botanists, foresters, urban planners, landscape architects and remote sensing specialists.

A multi-methodological evaluation approach for assessing the impact of neighbourhood quality on public health.

Starting from a growing interest for urban neighbourhood health effects, the purpose of this paper is to suggest a multi-methodological approach for providing a comprehensive evaluation of the quality of open spaces under the urban design perspective. Despite the growing body of research and empirical evidence about the relationship among quality of built environment and public health, there is still a lack of studies on urban quality assessment. This paper brings forward a multi-methodological approach for assessing the quality of open spaces by the assignment of a composite score.