Technological and environmental strategies for the redevelopment of Outdoor Learning spaces and the establishment of energy hubs in school buildings

The extreme events related to climate change and the urban heat island phenomenon have important impacts on people and cause serious consequences to existing buildings, such as increased resource consumption and environmental footprint, adverse effects on human health, and reduced occupant comfort. In this context, school buildings represent a critical category among existing building types due to high energy consumption, high density, and high vulnerability of occupants. For this reason, school buildings play a key role in the transition to a low-emission economy, being a significant part of the public building stock. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated paths of innovation, prompting schools of all levels to a sudden rethinking of the education and, consequently, the environment and school architectures. The health crisis has made schools more aware of the need to support a change process that knows how to link teaching to new ways of “inhabiting” schools. In this context, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has focused its attention in the last decade on the relationship between school environments and learning processes, highlighting the importance of considering the pedagogical-didactic paradigm at the center of design with punctual attention dedicated to school outdoor spaces, considered as places in which to activate and enhance a different and better educational offer. The current research is the result of a multidisciplinary work conducted within the PDTA Department of Sapienza University of Rome related to the identification of technological and environmental strategies applied to a case study within the city of Rome and replicable in similar contexts and climatic conditions. The strategies include the redevelopment of outdoor spaces, through the design of passive bioclimatic pavilions where to experiment alternative education in optimal comfort conditions, and the establishment of an Energy Hub to serve the school buildings in the intervention area and the community, through the satisfaction of energy demand from renewable sources. From the research it emerges how, starting from the analyses of the demanding framework and the discussion with stakeholders, the redevelopment of educational spaces can become a laboratory of experimentation, in which the energy efficiency benefits and the integration of devices and technologies for the renewable energy production and the outdoor comfort improvement for Outdoor Learning activities can be demonstrated.