**Preface to "Urban Climate and Adaptation Tools"**

In 1925, Le Corbusier, in his book Urbanisme, wondered if cities are still capable of preserving the dignity of human beings. That question today appears even more motivated by two phenomena that have become increasingly evident over time: urbanization and climate change.

Urbanization has led the human community to find itself, today, within the geographical perimeter of cities with growth rates that in a few decades into the future, will ensure that all men can be defined as citizens; but citizenship has a much deeper meaning than living in one place. Citizenship means being able to provide the human being with all those elements of life and well-being that reconcile all aspects of one's nature: opportunities for one's expectations, physiological well-being, social well-being, protection of one's own safety. That ability to live fully, being able to bring out all their physical and intellectual abilities. Well-being understood as the overall state of being human. Almost a century after that question, the answer cannot be positive. Although it is not possible for cities to define a precise development model, what we have seen was an urbanization that has profoundly undermined the sustainable livelihoods of places and, therefore, of the human being.

The climate–environmental problem has therefore caused all the contradictions of the modern era to explode, placing humankind in danger. Pollution, rising temperatures, intense precipitation phenomena endanger life but, above all, the well-being of citizens, with health understood as a primary good. It is the task of politics to find solutions, and the task of science and technology to find the tools to support politics in the search for solutions.

The time is actually ripe for a transition—for a transition to a more sustainable world where the human being is at the center of the system, the replacement of gross domestic product with gross domestic well-being. We already own our toolbox, which can also be improved and implemented, and this collection of works allows us to understand that the passage to the answer to that fundamental question is within reach. In reading, it will be clear that, today, we have tools to respond, we have risk reduction methodologies, we have policies based on scientific assumptions, we have the possibility of transforming a danger into new growth opportunities. The overview offered is vast, and this can only lead us to be optimistic. The real knot is not given by science or the will of politics: the real knot is given by the citizen's ability to make this hope their own, to transform it into daily awareness of what can be done in an exercise of democracy in understanding that there exists diversity that must be protected and that special actions are necessary for these; protections that are then transformed into greater resources to be redistributed for the benefit of all. The environment and climate today can represent an opportunity; by building more resilient cities, we not only protect the weakest groups but, in fact, we free up resources represented by health costs which in healthier environments are reduced, allowing access to a full life to all citizens.

The recent pandemic, with all the grief and suffering, has opened our eyes to the future and to the meaning of being a community. It has also shown us how the contradictions of modern living can explode in a very short time for us, used to talking about what the world will be like in 2050, and we understand that we don't know what tomorrow itself will be like. But we have the tools to change, and you have them in your hands right now, and now is the time to apply them.

#### **Teodoro Georgiadis, Letizia Cremonini** *Editors*
