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Recent data show that there are intensifications of phenomena related to climate change, such as the increasing of heavy rains, more frequent and intense droughts connected with fires, and alterations of the local climatic conditions, including heat islands with consequent impacts on cities, districts, and buildings. Not only are natural hazards stressing Europe but also human-induced events like low-magnitude earthquakes as a direct cause of fracking or mining. This study aimed to investigate the significant stressors and summarize what impact is the most dangerous in each European country. There is a need to secure the operating conditions of urban infrastructures and to preserve a high-quality indoor environment of buildings. The main scope of this paper is to compare selected tools that evaluate the urban and building resilience and to assess their suitability, based on an analysis of natural and human-induced hazards in the European countries. The results represent a contribution to urban and architectural planning practice, and to the consistent implementation of measures to improve the resilience of the built environment by providing guidance as to which assessment tool is most suitable for each country.

Over the last ten years, due to the increase in frequency and severity of climate change effects, resilience in buildings has become a growing topic in the current global discussion on climate change adaptation. Designing both sustainable and resilient constructions would help to face such effects; however, sustainability and resilience in design have been mostly treated separately so far. Since sustainability has been considered more than resilience, paying deeper attention to the latter is indispensable to reducing building vulnerability. The purpose of this article is to examine the commonalities between the sustainability and resilience of buildings using two different approaches: (i) a systematic literature review, taking into consideration a 10-year period for selecting records, and (ii) an analysis of five green building rating systems and five resilience rating systems and guidelines selected according to their popularity and number of certified buildings. There is an overlap in some indicators between the two domains at the building level, as shown by the results from both paths. These aspects could assist in considering sustainability and resilience from the very beginning of the design process. This will ensure that buildings may be designed more effectively by considering and enhancing the synergies between the two domains. This paper targets potential stakeholders who may be interested in including such an integrated implementation in their designs.

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The evidences of the influence of climate change (CC) in most of the key sectors of human activities are frequently reported by the news and media with increasing concern. The building sector, and particularly energy use in the residential sector, represents a crucial field of investigation as demonstrated by specific scientific literature. The paper reports a study on building energy consumption and the related effect on indoor thermal comfort considering the impacts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 report about temperature increase projection. The research includes a case study in New York City, assuming three different scenarios. The outcomes evidence a decrease in energy demand for heating and an increase in energy demand for cooling, with a relevant shift due to the summer period temperature variations. The challenge of the last decades for sustainable design was to increase insulation for improving thermal behavior, highly reducing the energy demand during winter time, however, the projections over the next decades suggest that the summer regime will represent a future and major challenge in order to reduce overheating and ensure comfortable (or at least acceptable) living conditions inside buildings. The growing request of energy for cooling is generating increasing pressure on the supply system with peaks in the case of extreme events that lead to the grid collapse and to massive blackouts in several cities. This is usually tackled by strengthening the energy infrastructure, however, the users’ behavior and lifestyle will strongly influence the system capacity in stress conditions. This study focuses on the understanding of these phenomena and particularly on the relevance of the users’ perception of indoor comfort, assuming the IPCC projections as the basis for a future scenario.

Gas radon is the main source of ionising radiation for humans and the second cause of lung cancer, just after smoking. Radon is present in the ground, and its concentration differs soil by soil according to the permeability and the mineral composition. Since radon mainly penetrates a building through cracks and fractures at the foundation level, it is necessary to focus on that area. The problem of high radon indoors concentration is present largely in Europe and in those countries where the heating indoors is privileged since there is a high-temperature difference between outdoors and indoors in winter. The waterproof membranes placed continuously in the structures that are in contact with the soil are one of the cheapest and easy-to-install radon mitigation solutions. Membrane-based measures, like all remedial measures, represent operational and embodied environmental impacts; the lasts were more or less ignored so far. Still, as buildings are becoming energy-efficient and should ensure a high level of indoor comfort, the environmental impacts of these membranes are recognised as being noteworthy and shall be methodically examined. The paper aims to assess the contribution of embodied impacts of five macro-categories of membranes that could be installed to protect buildings against radon. The embodied impacts are calculated for the A1-A3 LCA stages and compared against each other in relation to one square meter and the radon resistance.

Public spaces are the living rooms of cities, accessible to everyone without any restrictions. Public spaces are the calling card of the city; they are where the community comes together. Their design either enables or complicates community life. From a visitor's point of view, public spaces are the first things to be noticed and encountered in a city. Due to various circumstances, public spaces sometimes fail to meet the abovementioned features or do not fulfil them to the degree they should. Thus, the presented methodology guidelines may help small cities representatives who do not have the professional or personnel capacity to deal with public spaces through planning, preparation and contracting the public spaces studies, which leads to a quality assessment of public spaces. The guidelines also include tips for improving public spaces, recommended practices for public participation in planning the transformation of public areas, and a site assessment form for a non-expert's perspective.