12. “Surviving the City”. Nature as an Architecture Design Strategy for a More Resilient Urban Ecosystem

In a scenario in which cities will be the environment inhabited by more than 80% of the world’s population, architecture has to respond to the challenge of shared living in a critical environmental context. Climate change has pushed the architecture profession to expand its knowledge for more adaptive design towards the environment and its inhabitants. Nature becomes the strategy that can help reduce the impacts of climate change on cities and improve people’s mental and physical well-being. This essay investigates the architect’s new role in the green transition. This necessary transition opens up new scenarios: design should overcome the individual building and the massive use of technologies or simple retrofitting but deal with the relationship the building has with its context. New tools derived from research and the ecosystem-based approach can help respond to the main goals of Agenda 2030 and the values of the New European Bauhaus. The analysis of case studies will demonstrate the effectiveness of this trans-scalar approach, from the single building to the urban scale.