Towards Climate Proof Cities : Innovative Tools and Policies for Territorial Government

Climate change is one of the most relevant issues (both political and scientific) of the twenty-first century. If every crisis has brought to light new issues, new research paths, and sometimes even new solutions, then the challenges posed by climate change offer the opportunity for spatial planning to come back and reclaim its social usefulness to solve problems by redefining objectives, fields of investigation, and methodologies. The purpose of the chapter is to add a further element in this field of research by reconstructing the state-of-the-art scientific research and finding the limitations and potentialities of initiatives undertaken to date, as well as to synthesise a methodological and practical proposal in order to offer to public administration and local authorities a ‘practical way’ to make local climate policies and plans more effective. It therefore proposes an investigation process that moves away from the urgency and need to address some initial questions: what does planning or designing low carbon or climate-proof cities and territories mean? What are the obstacles to developing this kind of planning process? What are the governance implications on a local and transnational level, and what is the relationship between these two levels? Moving from a theoretical dimension to a more practical one involves different areas of public administration, and means developing innovative processes for the re-designing of instruments, priorities, actors, and organisational structures, thus leading to a new governance paradigm for cities and territories. This paradigm represents a new model to address the challenges of climate change towards climate proof cities.