Best practices for architectural, energetic and social informal city retrofitting

This contribution is related to a research work on Sustainable Urban Redevelopment, carried out through the AMSA Laboratory of the DATA Department, University of Rome La Sapienza, in the Favela Mangueira in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) developing context, in a setting that shares interests with Italy (Malagrotta Rome) in terms of natural and environmental resource protection and social and economical citizens’ condition improvement, even if there are still economical, social, cultural and climatic differences between the two countries. In fact the proposed research and design experimentation on the architectural, ecological and energy redevelopment theme and on Urban Farming can become an important contribution to the creation of a sustainable development model for a future “living on the earth” that, through redevelopment actions on spontaneous cities - that is, settlements that were spontaneously generated - offers new energy and agricultural self-production modalities; these will no longer be strictly applicable to the countryside – that are becoming more and more insufficient – but also in the urban built environment, revitalizing also the “0 Km agricultural-energy production” concept and therefore the opportunity of reducing, if not even eliminating, the transportation of material and immaterial goods and the related pollution rates. The general objective of the research was to: operate following the life cycle regeneration of territories with different settlement densities, developing systemically strategies and actions, operating also a reconversion of the settlement’s organization, beginning with the settlements characterized by high urban concentration, activating strategies and actions aimed at limiting the land take up and, therefore, boosting vertical construction and saving large outdoor areas characterized by high ecological balance; to create building settlement units that meet environmental conformity standards, based on a functional mix that includes urban functions, different but integrated, optimizing internal autonomous operational capacities and therefore reducing drastically the dependency from the exterior. Last, but not least, to realize urban units with the capacity of optimizing the virtuous closure of the operational and self regeneration life cycles (material and immaterial resources, separated storage, recycling and waste disposal, water cycle management, efficient energy production); this characteristic will guarantee high comfort levels to the community, both in their individual and group activities.