Davide Geneletti, Associate professor of the University of Trento, is among the three winners of the “City Innovative Thinker Award”, promoted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Pandemic Response CoLab, in the framework of The Post-COVID-19 City challenge.
The challenge aimed at driving multidisciplinary thinking and collaboration around urban design for the post-COVID-19 city. The Pandemic Response CoLab of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence help individuals and groups work together to solve practical problems created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was inspiring to see so much diversity in the responses we received. From around the world, people were really concerned with almost every aspect of the modern city – whether it be re-designing an urban block or re-thinking how better to connect as citizens in society in terms of crisis in a city, it was inspiring to see how nature became a central part to each of these diverse solutions.” – M’Lisa Colbert, Co-Director, The Nature of Cities.
Three most promising solutions was selected by expert judges on MIT Pandemic Response CoLab and awarded the “City Innovative Thinker Award”. Davide Geneletti was one of the recipients of the award with his project proposal on “Renaturing marginal public spaces for people and ecosystems”.
This project focuses on the city of Trento, and particularly on marginal spaces: fragments of fallow/abandoned land and small plots in a state of disuse within the urban fabric. The project aims at assessing the suitability of these spaces to be transformed into “Nature-based Solutions”, such as community gardens, Kyoto forests, habitat patches and pocket parks.
Through stakeholder engagement and ecosystem services assessment, the project will analyze and quantify the potential benefits of these Nature-based solutions in terms of food production, air purification, water regulation, microclimate regulation, noise mitigation, as well as mental and physical wellbeing of urban dwellers.
The results can be used as the cornerstones for the development of a city-scale “Urban Greening Plan”, consistently with the recommendations of the recent European Union Biodiversity Strategy 2030.