Cities and decarbonisation: an assessment model for the technological reconfiguration of proximity open spaces.

It is well known that a large percentage of total climate-changing gas emissions comes from the energy sector and that, therefore, promoting energy from RES is an important tool to mitigate the effects of climate change, not only to reduce the use of fossil fuels and waste in transport and building management, but also to incentivise on-site production and more responsible use of energy. Within the framework of the most recent European initiatives (REPowerEU, Directive 2023/1791), the establishment of Renewable Energy Communities has also become a national priority (implementing Decree of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security - MASE - on REC, 2023) to foster decentralised energy production, especially in urban areas. However, alongside the decarbonisation processes underway, strategies related to the energy transition necessarily interrelate with other dimensions of the resilience of the built environment that contribute to enhancing its adaptive capacities, such as those related to the ecosystem services that can be provided. In the need to decarbonise, and in the ever more incisive search for a proximity dimension, cities, increasingly populated, store their wealth in the proximity open spaces. Meeting places and important opportunities for transition, intended to support proximity by accommodating new functions, supporting sustainable mobility and energy transition, enhancing ecosystem services and encouraging sociability among citizens sharing the space. With reference to some case studies in Rome, the research investigates the contribution of proximity open spaces to mitigation of and adaptation to the effects of climate change. The methodology is based on the elaboration of scenarios related to three potential areas for the decarbonisation of cities (Energy, Ecosystem Services, Mobility), and aims to provide interconnection hypotheses between them in order to identify possible synergies or conflicts in the use of proximity open spaces, supporting their reconfiguration in support of possible evolutionary scenarios of city regeneration through conscious decisions. The application of the method on different Roman urban fabrics, representative of urban morphologies and building typologies of the consolidated city, makes it possible to compare their prevailing attitudes with respect to the areas investigated, and to identify the 'vocation', more or less strong, of their open proximity spaces, to accommodate the new functions supporting decarbonisation. In a scenario in which environmental, social, economic and health risks coexist, the tool is proposed as a decision support for planners and administrators in the area, to prefigure and measure the decarbonisation capacity of possible project configurations and support their effectiveness with data.