The concentration of a relevant rate of the world population in urban areas (up to 70% in 2050 according to World Health Organization) forces adaptation systems and regenerative strategies for healthy and liveable cities. In this context, the ever-increasing asphalt and concrete surfaces and the lacking green and permeable areas, due to high population density, reduce
the evapotranspiration capacities of soils, triggering runoff, surface temperatures, and urban heat island. The scarcity of green areas, along with the urban heat island phenomenon and the general pollution of urban areas, contributes to drastically limiting the overall sense of urban health, resulting even more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic which strongly entailed social effects due to distancing and limitation in visiting accessible green areas. The health emergency has brought attention back to the vegetated
open spaces, rediscovering the outdoor areas as training spaces and useful resource. In the last decade a widespread literature proved the beneficial conditions and the urban resilience improvement of greening interventions, along with the enhancement of urban health. Nevertheless, a focus on operational tools to support decision-makers in the definition of proper buildings and areas to engage greening intervention based on their adaptability and suitability is still missing. In the light of the financial, health,
environmental, and war crisis characterizing the current situation, the Ecological Transition should find a specific declination in public buildings as urban polycenters. Working in this context, the GREENWORK project aims to develop an interdisciplinary framework to strategically convert the most appropriate public buildings, and the related open areas, into a health and resilience “hub”.

Description of the WorkPackages (WPs)

The aim of GREENWORK project is to develop an integrated operating framework for the regeneration of large urban public buildings with wide, uncovered areas, either courtyards and cloisters or more generally outdoor areas, in terms of health and well-being, adaptation/mitigation, safety, technology and innovation. Attention will be paid to the building envelope (roofs and facades) and open spaces by proposing greening interventions with a specific focus on the increasing permeable surfaces and their potential
public use. Such strategies are particularly attractive in urban areas, in both centre and suburbs showing the lack of large green public spaces. The simple conversion with NBSs of courtyards and cloisters of historic public buildings, or the intervention on roofs and facades of social housing complexes, for example, allow the enhancement of outdoor public green spaces, as well as increasing the permeable surfaces with favourable consequences on climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. To develop the project, a strongly interdisciplinary research team has been organized, including the expertise of Engineering, Architecture, Agronomy, Psychology, and Statistics, belonging to three research units: UNINA (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), UNICT (Università degli Studi di CATANIA), and UNIPA (Università degli Studi di PALERMO). The selection was done to include locations of possible case studies in the Mediterranean area for the assessment of design interventions and their impacts; the use of vegetation as a passive strategy for urban resilience enhancement, the sustainability growth, the improvement of outdoor and indoor environmental quality, and the increase of permeable open space surfaces. The project is structured with 5 WPs, each including multiple tasks. For each task, specific deliverables are defined. The fulfilment of the deliverables of the tasks contributes to reaching the general milestones of the project (even defined in the GANTT chart, section B.1/7), that represent the qualitative advancement of the project and establish temporal check points ensuring the effective progress of the activities through WPs.