I chiostri e il tessuto urbano storico: analisi tipologica e microclimatica di due chiostri a Parma alla luce del cambiamento climatico

Climate change, and its direct consequences such as global warming, prolonged dry seasons, and increasingly severe weather events, are threatening our built heritage and affecting our cultural landscapes. The changes that are affecting our historical cities are increasingly put at risk as well as the open and transitional spaces. Among those, traditional cloisters, a precious part of the Ital- ian cultural heritage because of their peculiar historical, constructive, and environmental values, are neglected and their conservation is endangered. Very few studies have addressed the influence of overheating mechanisms on cloister buildings for existing historical cities. The typology of the cloister is widespread not only in historic Italian cities and in the Mediterranean basin, and its invariants, typological and environmental ones are here analyzed in order to identify recurring elements to be maximized for facing climate change challenges. The purpose of this paper is to identify, through the tools of the typological and the environmental assessment, the potential for thermal resilience offered by the open space of the cloister. This paper focuses mainly on the im- pact of urban form and cloister form on overheating problems for today and future climate. The microclimatic analyses, carried out through the ENVI-met software for two historic cloisters in the city of Parma, show that the compactness of the urban cloisters contributes to reducing out- door temperatures in a very effective way, both in the current scenario and in the projected 2080.