Community Engagement and Greening Strategies as Enabling Practices for Inclusive and Resilient Cities

The climate change challenges call for innovative and sustainable policies and governance models, capable of achieving adaptation and mitigation goals working on a necessary behavioural societal change, both at individual and collective levels. Cities and their public spaces represent an ideal ground for the implementation of innovative strategies, which combine participatory and engagement practices to physical transformations of urban areas in a regenerative perspective. Co-design and participatory paths can trigger reactivation and re-appropriation of underused spaces, generate new dynamics in the public space use and provide effective solutions to tackle climate change, improving outdoor microclimatic comfort conditions. The implementation of demonstrative and temporary interventions – based on greening actions co-created with local administrations, stakeholders and citizens and supported by technologies – represents a viable and effective practice in order to experiment, test, monitor and evaluate shared pathways to more liveable, resilient and sustainable cities. This combined approach was experimented in the Bologna University area by the EU Horizon 2020 project ROCK – Regeneration and Optimisation of Cultural Heritage in Creative and Knowledge Cities (GA 730280) – through a series of pilot actions aimed at public open space utilization and potential enhancement in particular in the historical city centres, generating new resilient processes in terms of environmental sustainability and social inclusion.