Climatic performance of urban texture: public spaces in Venice fabric

he open spaces of Venice represent an emblematic excerpt of the social, environmental, and traditional identity of city life. One of the most disregarded aspects in Venice is the relationship between the natural and the built environment elements, such as building facades and the waterways. The paper thus focuses on assessing the fabric characteristics and their trade-offs in two of the largest public spaces in Venice. The first is Campo San Polo, a great quadrangular “Campo” of the Venetian urban structure dating back to the 10th-11th century known as the “Archipelago City”. The second one is Campo Santa Maria Formosa, dated back to Gothic Venice, which features a bone structure and is characterized by the balance between water and land systems. The climatic performance of the two Campo Types is based on morphological and microclimatic analysis via ENVI-met, to identify the integrated performance of public spaces as the preferential place for reading, designing, and living in a city. The climatic behaviour of the Campo types was performed considering four key variables: urban morphology, anthropogenic heat from buildings facades and from street materials, albedo values, and the role of water. The results show that the variability of urban form has a major impact on urban temperature, urban livability, as well as on thermal resilience behaviour in future climatic conditions.