It is unquestionable that the global community is challenged by distressing crises (political, social, economic and environmental), which are sometimes referred to as “wicked problems” due to their idiosyncratic, and apparently impossible to tackle, nature. These problems often display a huge interconnectedness (they are reciprocally reinforcing) and may be generative of new issues (a sort of challenge-within-the-challenge mechanism), making their proper handling even harder and any adopted approach highly controversial. These crises are recurrent and similar from place to place, but their magnitude is growing in size and affecting people on a global scale, thus making the task of approaching them far too complex for any single stakeholder or territorial community alone. For these reasons, now more than ever, new individual behaviours and collective practices, innovative rules and norms, novel local and national policies and wider international cooperation agreements often occur and are widely experimented on, all over the world, bringing about sustainable solutions at multiple levels and scales. Cities are directly affected by most of these crises and, at the same time, represent the place where the larger sustainability game is played. However, as most people think, the overwhelming challenges embedded in city life for individuals, families, civil societies and governments can, and must, be seen also as opportunities for innovation, diffused equity, more diligent foresight and, above all, pragmatism. In fact, it is not only due to the urbanization trends that we turn to cities when we look for solutions to the wicked problems that the world faces. Free from national and global politics, though always acting in its shadow, cities are, more and more, places where creative problem-solving flourishes (sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by purposeful construct) even when such issues as climate change, migration, and economic inequality are at the forefront of change makers. Cities know how to get things done, and they are doing just that all over the world (Brescia and Marshall 2016a). Further to the above, cities provide crucial resources for our future (Brescia and Marshall 2016a). This is because they are not simply population aggregation centres: they are knowledge hubs and sustainable power plants; they serve as first shelters for immigrant people; they are fertile environments for old and new trading and innovation projects (Brescia and Marshall 2016b). It is hence there that intelligent, local answers to global challenges can be and are being identified and experimented. For a long time, however, cities have been seen as passive participants to multilateral efforts for a more sustainable development. Now, it is clear and globally shared that they are key actors in this global and planetary battle: they are asked increasingly often to take charge of the necessary, often complex, transitions. To this end, however, cities must become fully aware of being key environments for change, due to the huge density of resources, energies, knowledge and skills within (Dvir and Pasher 2004) and also due to their interconnected nature, which enables place-based interactions to materialize among different operators, organizations, initiatives, institutions, etc. In these systems of an urban nature, one finds the right breeding ground to stimulate the emergence or integration of innovative solutions, capable of contributing to ignite the necessary and urgent systemic changes and transitions in local and global communities. However, envisioning, designing and governing transformations, while working in such complex environments, requires an intense dialogue between different, and sometimes distant, disciplines and practices, theories and applications, cultures and visions, acting as co-located forces, i.e. all being active in a same place. In addition, capturing, designing, guiding and spreading out those transformations which can be relevant for the global challenges is also complex work, which requires aligning and synergizing differences and uniformities, immutability and instability, continuity and discontinuity. This work must also be carried out within environments that are often as complex as the problems themselves. Within every city to some extent, this acknowledgment and instrumentalisation of transformations can effectively begin, as it is there that the networked nature of the individuals and resources involved can find accessible hubs to access the dynamic and creative flows of the necessary information, knowledge and practices. Yet, cities are not alike when it comes to triggering, generating, hosting, and scaling up systemic and sustainable change (Molinari and Concilio 2016). Indeed, they show very diverse political, infrastructural, organizational and societal conditions, which act in different ways to preserve the status quo or foster new value creation, to prevent or facilitate innovation and to impede or ensure that it has a broader impact (Puerari et al. 2017). Overall, these conditions can be said to belong to two main and distinct groups (Puerari 2016). The first group is related to the productivity and vitality of a city’s cultural environment, including:

This open access book is about public open spaces, about people, and about the relationship between them and the role of technology in this relationship. It is about different approaches, methods, empirical studies, and concerns about a phenomenon that is increasingly being in the centre of sciences and strategies – the penetration of digital technologies in the urban space. As the main outcome of the CyberParks Project, this book aims at fostering the understanding about the current and future interactions of the nexus people, public spaces and technology. It addresses a wide range of challenges and multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging phenomena related to the penetration of technology in people’s lifestyles - affecting therefore the whole society, and with this, the production and use of public spaces. Cyberparks coined the term cyberpark to describe the mediated public space, that emerging type of urban spaces where nature and cybertechnologies blend together to generate hybrid experiences and enhance quality of life.

How have philosophers defined and conceptualized disasters? The short answer is: surprisingly little. They have hardly defined it explicitly, and they have provided implicit definitions pretty much like everyone else who has attempted it; that is, they have defined it in ways that suit their own purposes. That is the short answer, and of course it is too short. In what follows I will present a slightly longer one. Approaching the question of conceptualization of disasters in philosophy requires an idea of what philosophy is. Does the term refer to the activities carried out by people working from within academic philosophy departments? That characterization would be unsatisfactory, since it would leave out very significant parts of the historical philosophical canon—there were no philosophy departments in antiquity, for instance. And a lot of what is regarded as philosophy today would not fit the bill either. For instance, important contributions to political philosophy have come from political scientists or people working in government departments, and theologians have made important contributions to ethics. A more plausible characterization would be to say that ‘philosophy’ refers to a set of topics, including but not limited to ethics (including political philosophy), epistemology (including logic), and metaphysics, all very broadly conceived. Philosophy in this sense is about searching for answers to the questions—and I am paraphrasing Kant here—‘What is there? What can we know? What ought we to do?’ I take this to be a rather conventional characterization and will employ it in the present paper. I will, however, emphasize contributors who are identified by themselves and others as philosophers. The reason for this is simply that conceptualizations of disasters in other fields have been examined by others, who are no doubt more knowledgeable about those fields than I am. In this paper I attempt to give an overview of how disasters have been conceived of in philosophy. My focus will be on the analytic tradition. I will summarize and discuss some works where philosophers have explicitly engaged in defining disasters, and devote some more space to philosophers who have discussed philosophical issues pertaining to disasters and disaster-like situations without so much discussion of the definition of the term. Those have mainly been ethicists, normative as well as applied, and political philosophers. I also highlight how imagined disasters have been employed in philosophical thought experiments. I conclude by sketching some possible future developments.

This open access book describes the three planning approaches and legacy impacts for the Olympic Games in one locale: the city of Los Angeles, USA. The author critically compares the similarities and differences of the LA Olympics by reviewing the 1932 and 1984 Olympics and by analyzing the concurrent planning process for the 2028 Olympics. The author unravels the conditions that make (or do not make) LA28’s argument “we have staged the Games before, we can do it again” compelling. Setting the bid’s promises into the contemporary local and global mega-event contexts, the author analyzes why LA won the bids, how those wins allowed LA to negotiate concessions with the IOC and NOC, and how legacies were planned, executed, and ultimately evolved. The author concludes with a prediction which 2028 legacy promises might and might not be fulfilled given the local and international Olympic contexts.

This open access book presents theoretical and practical research relating to the vast, publicly financed program for the construction of new schools and the reorganization of existing educational buildings in Italy. This transformative process aims to give old buildings a fresh identity, to ensure that facilities are compliant with the new educational and teaching models, and to improve both energy efficiency and structural safety with respect to seismic activity. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on the social role of the school as a civic building that can serve the needs of the community. Innovations in both design and construction processes are then analyzed, paying special attention to the Building Information Modeling (BIM) strategy as a tool for the integration of different disciplines. The final section is devoted to the built heritage and tools, technologies, and approaches for the upgrading of existing buildings so that they meet the new regulations on building performance. The book will be of interest to all who wish to learn about the latest insights into the challenges posed by, and the opportunities afforded by, a comprehensive school building and renovation program.