Sustainable “Passive” Strategies to Improve Resilience and Comfort in Urban Areas: The Role of Construction Materials and Citizens Involvement

Dear Colleagues,

Urban areas are facing numerous challenges related to changing climate conditions, population growth, and land consumption. Many strategies are being studied to mitigate such challenges: Among them, “passive” ones allow mitigation without consuming additional energy, i.e., by exploiting the intrinsic performance of buildings and urban elements themselves or by involving citizens in adaptation and sustainability actions.

Indeed, the role of materials and construction elements as “passive” strategies towards the improvement of buildings’ energy performance and outdoor comfort in urban open spaces is well acknowledged. Cool materials acting as solar barriers, innovative or advanced insulation materials and bio-based, natural construction elements constitute effective solutions to reduce energy consumption, improve resilience in urban areas, and mitigate the carbon footprint of the built environment. Their application entails a complex evaluation: The intrinsic characteristics of the materials must be effectively exploited and their durability evaluated; the architectural surroundings need to be taken into account in doing so, as well as the specific climate zone where the materials will be applied.

In this panorama, citizens/pedestrians/inhabitants, i.e., those that live the urban areas, are often overlooked, while research demonstrated that their involvement and consideration (e.g., human-based energy retrofit, citizen science, and crowdsourcing phenomena towards urban data collection and participation) with respect to sustainability in urban areas is of fundamental importance. An overall evaluation of citizens’ comfort, as well as their active contribution, must be considered towards urban areas sustainability.

Therefore, in this Special Issue, we aim at gathering original research works and review articles focused on these two main areas. Contributions should investigate one of the two or their synergistic integration, which uncovers high potentialities towards sustainability. The topics include (but are not limited to):

• Design, development, and characterization of “passive” strategies towards the improvement of the built environment, focusing on materials and/or on the human dimension/citizens;
• Design, development, and characterization of innovative, bio-based, natural, reused, recycled, and advanced construction materials;
• Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies on construction materials and components;
• Numerical and experimental studies on construction materials effectiveness in improving built environment performance; and/or on human-based strategies and citizens involvement;
• Numerical and experimental studies, methodologies, and case studies about the retrofit of buildings, outdoor urban areas, and indoor comfort improvement;
• Methodologies and case studies, and numerical and experimental studies about citizens’ involvement towards sustainability in urban areas.

Dr. Federica Rosso
Prof. Marco Ferrero
Prof. Elisa Di Giuseppe
Dr. Stefano Cascone
Prof. Gaetano Sciuto
Guest Editors

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