Najet Aroua

Research project

Knowledge transfer between environmental sciences and urban planning. Interdisciplinary cooperation for a resilient Mediterranean city

Project summary

Since the 1990s, the challenges of climate change have placed cities and the ecological systems that sustain them at the heart of the debate. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an accelerated variation in the Earth’s climate has been observed for around fifty years. In the future, natural events are likely to become more frequent and stronger, with serious impacts on water resources, public health and ecological balances. This could lead to real humanitarian disasters, particularly in coastal cities in the Mediterranean basin, where physical, climatic and socio-economic characteristics determine a high level of risk.

Cities that contribute to worsening the impacts of climate change must take part in implementing measures to reduce and adapt to this phenomenon. Despite the growing interest in the environmental dimension in urban planning, it continues to be neglected or even ignored in the practice of urban planning and development.

The aim of this research project is to reflect on the development of working methods and tools for integrating the environmental dimension into the design of urban projects, through the organization of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional meetings and seminars. The expected outcome is to identify and analyze the causes of this failure, which, according to some studies, is less related to professional constraints than to a lack of operational information and knowledge transfer between scientists and urban planning practitioners.