Urban Climate Shelters to Adapt Cities to Climate Change. A Proposal for Schoolyards in Turin (Italy)

As the objective to limit the temperature increase to 1.5-2.0°C is still far-reaching, cities worldwide are promoting efforts to contrast the compound effects of climate change. Cities must undertake urgent actions to improve their adaptive capacities, working proactively with stakeholders and communities to cope with current and future climate change phenomena and impacts. This paper aims at understanding how cities can adapt to climate change, through a resilient transformation of urban spaces by design, and explicitly use climate shelters to respond to climate hazards, such as heat waves, flooding, and droughts. This paper focuses on the transformative potential of climate shelters in urban design, particularly within the framework of the ‘Climate Shelters (2019-2020)’ project funded by the European Commission’s Urban Innovation Actions (UIA) programme. The project aims at transforming schoolyards, currently based on impervious surfaces and low-albedo materials, to more sustainable, natural, and resilient ones, which contribute to adapting cities to climate change and citizens’ quality of life and health. Despite a lack of standardized terminology, the successful implementations in Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and The Hague prompted the introduction of the concept of Urban Climate Shelter (UCS), requesting a more comprehensive understating of this concept and its applicability to diverse urban contexts. The objective of this paper is to delve into the role of UCS within schoolyards. The focus extends beyond their function, emphasizing their potential as spaces that can strengthen the capacity of cities to adapt to climate change by engaging the local community and stakeholders and enhancing bottom-up approaches. Lastly, to illustrate this, a case study from Turin is presented, detailing the design of a proposed schoolyard and the upscaling process.