Research & experimentation Ricerca e sperimentazione Green Infrastructure as a climate change mitigation strategy: quantification of environmental & economic benefits for the City of Somerville Silvia Cioci a , Matthew J. Eckelman b , Annalisa Onnis-Hayden b a Department of Civil, Constructional and Environmental Engineeering, Sapienza University of Rome, IT b Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, US Highlights • Climate change mitigation systems and protection of the territory • Multifunctional ecological and environmental systems fort the reconnection of the territory and landscape • Evaluation of environmental and economic benefits and opportunity for social cohesion for the wellness and wellbeing. • The local scale as an essential element in the process of re-design the cities The growing awareness of the negative impact of human activities on climate has led to adopt territorial adaptation and mitigation policies. Strategies capable of coping with increasingly extreme and sudden negative impacts make their way into the sce- nario of territorial planning, which focus on choices that create more resilient cities. A suitable strategy for this new approach to territorial planning includes green infra- structure a multifunctional tool designed to mitigate impacts of climate change and to intervene on "urban waste" and dismiss places to re-naturalize and make them more inclusive. The paper examines the innovative scenario of the Inner Core in Bos- ton, Massachusetts, exploring the policies of the city of Somerville, which focus on the implementation of green infrastructure to provide multiple benefits. Former industrialized area of Somerville, the Inner Belt is one of the settlements most exposed to the climate crisis and particularly weak territorial context from a social, economic, and political point of view. The evidence of a settlement that "ceded to environmental blackmail" in exchange for jobs, required a procedural approach by rethinking the area in a strategic perspective capable of combining the needs of the community with adaptation to change. The Inner Belt was thus reconsidered as a hub (system of places), that is, as an integral part of the new vision of a green infrastruc- ture network for the city of Somerville and an urban area of planning emergency in the re-composition and identity re-appropriation of its widespread and pervasive waterproofed spaces. This choice highlighted the importance of the local scale in the process of redesigning the public space and forgotten places in the evolution of green infrastructure. This study analyzes and quantify the environmental and economic benefits provided by the green infrastructure, demonstrating the effectiveness of the adoption of this multi-functional strategy. Received: August 04, 2019 Reviewed: May 15, 2020 Accepted: June 06, 2020 On line: July 03, 2020 Article history Abstract Copyright 2020 Silvia Cioci, Matthew J. Eckelman, Annalisa Onnis-Hayden Email: silvia.cioci@uniroma1.it; m.eckelman@northeastern.edu; aonnis@coe.neu.edu ISSN online 2531-9906 | Open access article under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License UPLanD – Journal of Urban Planning, Landscape & environmental Design, 5(2), 39-50 [2020] Green Infrastructure Sustainability Best Management Practice Tools and Techniques Quantifications Keywords