The Green Deal and the sustainability perspectives through which we look at cities and territories today highlight the complexity of the challenges that urban planning is facing. This complexity can be attributed to several factors. Environmental challenges require us, on the one hand, to design responses to rapid and sudden events (such as the effects of climate change or pandemic events), increasing the quality of built and open spaces. On the other hand, they invite us to rethink the role of nature in the city through strategies that aim to increase urban resilience, improve the health of its inhabitants, guarantee food production, etc. Equally significant social challenges, moreover, urge us to rethink cities to make them accessible to all, especially socially vulnerable groups, allowing them to benefit from the services and resources of urban contexts. Finally, in this context, numerous self-organization practices, where inhabitants and associations acquire a decisive role in urban transformation processes, press us to consider a greater level of complexity in the framework of actors who can participate in a Green Deal city project. In the face of these conditions, we solicit contributions on the following issues. How can a resilient transformation of open and public urban spaces be guaranteed by welcoming, at different scales, different forms of nature within them? How can safer and more accessible spaces be designed through experimental design techniques and methods, such as Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs)? How can ‘bottom-up processes and practices’ innovate urban planning regulatory tools and design rules towards approaches that are more shared and open to the community? We favour contributions that combine theoretical reflections with concrete research and project experiences.
Keywords: bottom-up practices; nature-based solutions; tools and techniques; urban project; open urbanism; tactical urbanism; climate action; public spaces; urban agriculture.