Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies of The Urban Heat Island Effect in Mediterranean Area: The Case Study of Largo Annigoni in Florence (Italy)

Global warming is the most documented phenomenon of climate change. Any increase in global temperature affects human health and have a severe impact on the citizen's well-being and the overall environmental quality of urban contests (IPCC, 2018). Numerous studies report the specific impact of current and projected urban overheating on the increase of the energy demand for cooling purposes during the warm period. Urban climate and the phenomenon of ‘Urban Heat Island Intensity’ (UHI) have been extensively investigated in the last decades, and several scientific studies have been conducted in the South Europe (Santamouris M., 2013). Moreover, EU policies promote research and innovation actions on urban regeneration through the development and application of innovative nature-based solutions to improve well-being in urban areas and achieve the goal of zero emissions by 2050 (European Commission, 2015). Therefore, climate-adaptive design became an important tool to encourage the regeneration of contemporary cities, with a particular focus on the effects due to the combination of innovative technologies for mitigation and adaptation to climate change in the context of urban space. For this reason, in this paper an evaluation of the impacts of a design proposal developed for the urban regeneration of Largo Annigoni in Florence is done, to reduce heat stress at a micro-urban scale of the built environment. Simulation of microclimate conditions of the analysed area was performed using the three-dimensional software ENVI-met for urban modelling, comparing indexes of environmental comfort such as Predict-ed Mean Vote (PMV) and Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET).