The 3rd Conference on “Green Urbanism” (GU), 2019, follows the success of the previous event which was launched in 2016 and 2018. It aims to the Achieving of sustainability and resilience of urban environments as those are the key challenges of our time. This conference is a way to deal with limited resources as well as the need for adaptation to the effects of a changing climate and urban environments as they are increasingly questioning the sustainability and resilience of urban environments and infrastructure systems.

The world is in the midst of a disturbance of a growing, consuming population, and environmental degradation, which produces many environmental challenges such as global climate change, excessive fossil fuel dependency and the growing demand for energy, all likely to be major challenges and ones of the greatest problems facing humanity nowadays. The majority of the world cities are confronted with similar and comparable challenges, including for instance increases in resource consumption, mobility demand, pollution, urban sprawl, social inequities, and erosion of fertile topsoil and depletion of ecosystems. Since its early days, the discourse around “smart cities” has included environmental sustainability as one of its core principles.

In this context, urban design is the fundamental principle of how to shape our cities. Because almost half of the energy consumed is used in cities and urban built-up areas, it is necessary to avoid mistakes in urban design at early stages in order to own more sustainable cities. Green Urbanism reflects upon practical strategies focusing on increasing sustainability beyond and within the scope of individual buildings.
The conference discusses how urbanism is affected by the paradigms of ecology and how smart and green concepts, systems and interventions could truly constitute to the construction, management, operation and maintenance of sustainable and resilient urban cities, in the framework of both new urban developments and the transformation of existing urban environments.