City and mobility: towards an integrated approach to resolve energy problems

Abstract

The issue of integration between city, mobility and energy plays a central role in the current EU policies, aimed at achieving energy saving targets, independence from fossil fuels and enhance of the urban systems resilience, but the strategies of the single states are, however, still far from its implementation. This paper proposes a reading of the current policies and of the recent initiatives aimed at improving the energy efficiency of settlements, implemented at both Community and national level, aimed at laying the groundwork for the definition of an integrated approach between city and mobility to resolve energy problem. Therefore, the paper is divided into six parts. The first part describes the transition from the concept of sustainability to the concept of resilience and illustrates the central role played by this one in the current urban and territorial research; the second part briefly analyzes the main and more recent European directives related to city, mobility and energy, while the third part describes how the energy problem is afforded in the current programming and planning tools. The fourth and fifth parts, are intended to describe the innovative practices promoted in some European and Italian cities concerning energy efficiency aimed at the integration between urban and transport systems. The last part of the paper, finally, deals with the definition of a new systemic approach for achieving objectives of energy sustainability. This approach aims at integrating strategies and actions for strategies of mobility governance, based on the certain assumption that the core for the most part of energy problems is mainly represented in medium and large cities.

Keywords

• resilience, urban transformations, sustainable mobility, energy efficiency