The Subject area Surveying, planning and design for sustainable places – SusPlaces fosters the connection and interactions of research topics and disciplines regarding the transformations of the city and the territory, within the perspective of a sustainable development.

The virtuous interaction between anthropic and natural processes, at urban and territorial levels, is based on knowledge, methods and tools able to:

  • Combine the needs to inhabit an area with the need to protect the biodiversity and the functionality of the natural ecosystems;
  • Combine the current processes to inhabit and settle down in an area, with the sustainability of the energetic systems, from the building scale to the complete settling models, redesigning the mobility and infrastructure systems;
  • Safeguard the rights and desires of citizens, involving them in the choice directly affecting them, through suitable planning tools and approaches;

This working method requires the combination of many scientific approaches, such as:

  • Measurement and representation of places, GIS, Knowledge systems to support decision makers;
  • Analysis and evaluation of biodiversity and ecosystem processes and services;
  • Planning and design of sustainable buildings, integrated with building automation;
  • Renewable energies and passive systems for architecture, comfort of confined spaces;
  • Urban and territorial planning, targeted to sustainable development;
  • Planning and management of ecosystems with low human pressure;
  • Planning, control and management of infrastructural networks and mobility systems;
  • Communication planning;
  • Evaluation of environmental impacts, strategic evaluation, evaluation of sustainability.

The scientific effort pursues the preparation and development of approaches, methods and tools to study the single phenomena and their interactions, with the awareness that the interaction of processes may be complex and antagonist; It also pursues the prefiguration of solutions to problems which are analysed through the project approach.

This Subject area, as far as the application contexts of the scientific interest, explicitly refers to:

  • areas marked by relevant environmental heritage;
  • developing countries, which are considered as fundamental to prove the efficiency of troubleshooting methods.