The urban sustainability axis responds to environmental impacts and addresses energy-related challenges, such as carbon neutralisation and renewability production and supply, to achieve efficient and sufficient energy usage in the framework of extended urbanisation.
This axis is captured by the acronym for extended urbanisation, sustainability, and environment (EUSE), which marks a systemic approach to redefining resilience in infrastructure and spatial planning constrained by the tenets of regulatory planning, land use control, and zoning. Current environmental overload, connected to uncoordinated and fragmented land-use planning, has been a response for decades to the imperatives of massiveness: mass-production, mass-housing, mass-communication, and mass-mobility. The prevailing paradigms of technological efficiency and control require collaborative formulations of environmental sustainability as a necessary and urgent response to extended urbanisation.
The mission of EUSE is to identify sustainable, horizontal, equitable, and flexible urban prototypes. Conceived as an alternative to concepts such as density, compactness, limits, restrictions, permanence, and growth, EUSE integrates extended urbanisation and multi-scalar territorial apparatuses.
EUSE also seeks to advance the transition toward sustainable green and blue infrastructure and the efficient use of renewable forms of energy (e.g., solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal) by fostering the innovation of productive systems and envisioning sustainable lifestyles that align with the UN’s SDGs.
Therefore, EUSE’s work is closely tied to ecological principles, the sustainable use of natural renewable and non-renewable resources, and mitigation and adaptation strategies for neutralizing the greenhouse effect and catalysing urban transition.