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To ensure European Union (EU) commitments to the Kyoto protocol, on 29 January 2008 the European Commission launched the Covenant of Mayors (CoM). This is an initiative aimed at unilateral and voluntary participation of European cities in energy efficiency improvement, renewable energy source usage increase, and greenhouse gas emission reduction by 2020. The Municipality of Genoa, Italy, joined the initiative on February 2009 and its Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP), aimed at a 23.7% CO2 reduction by 2020, has been the first among European cities to be officially published by the European Commission. Following a description of EU environmental policies concerning the energy sector and related regulatory framework, this paper presents issues of CoM and SEAP from an overall standpoint and their application in the city of Genoa. The SEAP approach and criteria, initially considered at a general level, are then analyzed in detail with their operational consequences regarding the city. The Baseline Emission Inventory for the city, preparation of the SEAP, its implementation in the various sectors involved (buildings, renewable energy sources, transport, public policy, and others) are analyzed. Eventually, the SEAP monitoring strategy is addressed, considering assessment of the implemented actions, biennial monitoring report, and dynamic management of the CoM. In this way, a useful benchmark is provided to those facing this issue and, more generally, to those dealing with the management of energy sustainability at various levels.

In the past, national energy planning guided the development of a central program for infrastructure investment over a defined time period. However, in the current geopolitical context, environmental damage, fossil fuel depletion, and territorial imbalance caused by the centralised energy model are all factors that require a change of energy structure, establishing actions to invest in energy diversification, and solid commitment to local renewable energies. This also implies an enhancement of the role played by local bodies, and particularly by municipalities, in achieving the targets of the Kyoto Protocol and now of the Paris Agreement, because renewable sources need to be studied, applied, and exploited at the local scale. Within this framework, this paper is organized as an overview on the promotion and implementation of the major RES technologies in the deployment of the new energy paradigm at the urban scale, taking into account multiple targets. A survey of existing literature underlines how the RES topic is mostly approached as a problem of energy supply and implementation of technology, but actual sustainability in terms of a social development process and improvement of quality of life by residents is often neglected. Then, this overview stimulated the authors to highlight three main critical issues and gaps and support the need of an all-encompassing approach as a final recommendation for a general RES urban planning advancement.

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According to many sociologists and technologists today we live in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The research aims to investigate this paradigm shift that is taking place in the contemporary city to understand how urban design is facing this digital transformation. Starting from the technological and digital innovations that are pervading the field of architecture, engineering and urban planning, this study will also try to understand how these radical changes will affect citizens' life.

The relationship between the institutional (established in law) and non-institutional initiatives (not supported by law) that improve the public transport system is currently a debated topic. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most relevant aspects of this relationship during an emergency event, namely the paradigmatic case study of the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, which occurred in August 2018. The investigation, according to a consistent methodology widely used in the literature, is made up of a selection of interviews with professional figures particularly involved in institutional structures, drawing on qualitative results, and compared with official statistics. The events that occurred in Genoa, during the phase of reorganization of the urban transport service and the circulation in the city, underlined how the response of citizenship is a crucial element, including from the governance point of view. Analytic and observational findings reveal that non-institutional initiatives smooth major criticalities where formal institutions can only produce sub-optimal transport solutions (because of the limited means they own by virtue of the moment of emergency), providing evidence that the two modes of governance are absolutely complementary.

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