Search

From the 1950s onwards, the housing complexes of the Modern Movement were developed under particular social, economic, and technological circumstances. Half a century after their development, along with rapid and varied spatial, socioeconomic and environmental transformations, many mass housing sites in different localities are creating several problems and difficulties for their residents and cannot fulfill their everyday needs. Sometimes the planning policies and urban plans cannot address these problems, may neglect the community-level problems and make the everyday life of citizens in their neighborhoods less resilient and sustainable. The city, however, has a variety of territorial layers in terms of planning, designing, building, managing, monitoring, and controlling. These territorial layers, the quality of urban functions and services, and the everyday life of citizens are highly intertwined with their neighborhoods. Rather than waiting for urban public services from the local and central government levels, citizens have great potential to participate and shape their environment as part of territorial behavior. Such environmental transactions can start from very simple and small-scale actions with the involvement of local citizens at the community level. This paper aims to describe a bottom-up endeavor of an EU project titled European Middle-Class Mass Housing (MCMH-EU) on an example of a fifty-year-old mass housing site designed based on the Modern Movement principles. The Stakeholder Workshop (Co)Designing for Quality of Life in MCMH, held in Ankara in October 2022, on a cooperative housing site, suffering from several problems similar to its counterparts. The workshop gathered a group of international researchers, designers, and residents of the housing site to improve the local community's quality of life and sustainability. This paper investigates the opportunities and challenges of the MCMH site, the workshop process, and its outcomes. Finally, it discusses the potential and limitations of such a bottom-up planning and design approach.

European cities across the Mediterranean region face common climatic threats. Urbanised areas are highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and climate extremes. Cities concentrate population and assets, and losses and damages as a result of climate change impacts such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, landslides, coastal hazards are likely. So far, however, there is no systematic understanding how cities in the Mediterranean Europe are preparing to adapt to these impacts, nor of how they aim to increase their resilience and adaptive capacity. Understanding how cities plan to manage climatic risks will help to identify action gaps, allocate resources and provides better-informed climate policy, at local, regional national and international scale. This research gathered and analysed adaptation planning documents in a representative sample of 73 cities across 9 Mediterranean European countries (France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta) in the context of their national policies. The results and this paper shed important light on the progress of adaptation planning, by focusing on identified impacts and proposed adaptation measures. N/A

Second Assessment of Local Climate Action Plan (LCAPs) in 85 Urban Audit core cities, EU-28.

Evidence from the Second Assessment of Local Climate Change Plans conducted on all Urban Audit (UA) Cities across the EU-28 was presented. The UA Cities are large- and medium-sized cities of regional representativeness and comprise more than 900 European cities in total. As part of the assessment researchers collect and analyse the cities’ local adaptation and mitigation plans. This intervention will focus on the state and content of these plans as well as the information used to develop the plans: which information was derived from national assessments, which information was produced at local level and which information gaps were encountered.