RESTART
Urban Climate Justice and Community Participation: Towards Inclusive Adaptation Strategies

RESTART (Urban Climate Justice and Community Participation: Towards Inclusive Adaptation Strategies) is a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship that develops a new methodology to integrate climate justice into urban adaptation planning. The project focuses on the socio‑environmental impacts of heat waves (HW) and urban heat islands (UHI) in two pilot cities: Padua (Italy) and Tempe (USA).

The methodology is structured around the three main pillars of climate justice:

  • Procedural justice — ensuring fair, transparent, and inclusive decision‑making by actively engaging different social groups and stakeholders.
  • Distributional justice — mapping how adaptation resources and benefits are distributed across urban neighborhoods.
  • Recognitional justice — addressing cultural and socio‑economic injustices, with attention to marginalized and vulnerable groups (e.g. women, the elderly, migrants, people with disabilities).

Through a combination of remote sensing, GIS‑based Multi‑Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), citizen science, participatory GIS (PPGIS), and counter‑mapping, RESTART co‑produces spatial evidence and participatory processes to support more just and inclusive urban adaptation policies. The project also emphasizes the gender dimension, highlighting how climate crises exacerbate existing inequalities, and integrates intersectional perspectives into adaptation planning.

The fellowship is hosted at the University of Padua (Italy), in collaboration with Arizona State University (USA) and the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (ICTA‑UAB, Spain), under the supervision of Prof. Sara Meerow, Prof. Massimo De Marchi, and Prof. Isabelle Anguelovski.

The Researcher

Francesca Peroni is the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow leading RESTART. She holds a Master’s degree in Architecture (IUAV, Venice), an Advanced Master in GIScience and UAV, and a PhD in Human Geography (University of Padua). Her interdisciplinary background bridges urban sustainability, geospatial analysis, and socio‑environmental justice.

She is a member of the Centre of Excellence on Climate Justice (University of Padua). Her research explores how cities can address climate change impacts equitably, with a strong focus on participatory and citizen‑science approaches. She has coordinated international collaborations, served as guest editor for journals and books on climate justice, and published extensively on soil sealing, urban sustainability, and adaptation planning.

Currently, she was also lectures at the international Master STeDe‑CCD and the Advanced Master in GIScience and UAV at the University of Padua, teaching courses on geovisualization, biodiversity, landscapes, and networks.

More about Francesca:

Conferences