Small green areas for energy saving: effects on different urban settlements

The aspects of sustainability, to date, emerge as a central theme within the plethora of definitions of the Smart City. In the current debate, the awareness that ICT is only one of the tools and not the key to the new design of the urban organism is growing, especially according to the new requirements to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, placed on top of the increasingly pressing global challenges (climate change, energy, land use, etc.). One goal of urban sustainability seems to be in contradiction with one of the main points of the Smart City model: the need to densify the city, caused by the rapid population growth. If cities are designed to be more compact to optimize land use, how do we prevent the risk of town cramming? A possible answer may come from the study of the relationship between full and empty urban spaces: the buildings on the one side, and the open spaces on the other. The equilibrium between these spaces needs to be studied in order to direct policies and interventions to correctly locate, size and design the green spaces systems, in relation to energy consumption, environmental comfort and CO2 reduction positive effects. This contribution presents the first results of a study aimed at determining the green space dimensions threshold values, which influence urban microclimate lowering temperatures, and their cooling distances, in relation to different settlement density values of the urban fabric.