Urban Services and Climate Change Adaptation. Applying a Novel Methodological Framework

The paper deals with adaptation to climate change in urban environments through the adoption of Soft-resilience strategies. It takes the moves from the distinction between hard and soft approach for built environment adaptation – and their complementarity – up to suggest that soft solutions would represent an effective option to respond to unprecedented emerging risks. The contribution opens with an interpretation of the still ongoing global crisis as an important lesson and introduces the hypothesis that urban services play a fundamental role as a support to human systems in coping with climate change impacts. This led to the research hypothesis for which these services would constitute by themselves a soft, low-regret and co-benefit adaptation strategy. The meta-design of new procedural models for the delivery and the operation of urban services aimed at improving climate resilience (and, thus, definable as Adaptation services), based on the optimal exploitation of re-organizational and information management strategies, represents an innovative research line. The paper goes through the development of a dedicated method to be applied for mapping potential transitions in specific territorial contexts. It provides for the in-depth analysis of four main aspects characterizing Adaptation services management: i) the organizational structure of the subjects involved; ii) the service supply chain; iii) information management processes; iv) multi-scale and multi-level interactions between different services. Some representative examples of the implementation of the method in Italian and European real cases are presented: urban greenery services in Milano, urban mobility in San Donato Milanese, Civil Protection in Novate Milanese, climate and consulting services in Hamburg. The convergence of insights collected from different sources (information triangulation), by means of systematic literature review, analysis of policy documents and a continuous dialogue with key stakeholders through semi-structured interviews and cooperation agreements, shall ensure the consistency of the research findings.