Riqualificazione energetica, ecologica ed ambientale del tessuto urbano. Strategie di densificazione e innovazione

The main goals connected with living in the past decade have always been focused on achieving the energy, environmental, and social quality of building complexes. Within this process the design becomes the synthesis of choices that embody the concept of environmental sustainability, the renewed social dimension, and the economic and financial planning of the work. Striving to meet the renewed social and economic demand, the building experiments taking place in Europe are based on projects functioning within an operational framework consisting of four thematic macro areas: renewable resources and energy efficiency; agriculture, the agro-food industry, and its distribution; the design, management, and sustainable running of infrastructure and mobility systems; the use and safeguard of the territory. For a designer/planner the task is to produce a synthesis of operational dimensions that translates into the four strategies: 0 emissions, 0 energy consumption, km 0 (local) production, and 0 land take. This calls for a widespread energy generation; a flexible sustainable transport system consisting of public transit vehicles and carpooling among private citizens; an efficient waste management with chains for the recovery of materials from dismantled buildings and scrap in general. Moreover, another part of this is the type-technical-morphological innovation of homes, focusing on an improvement of performance and on supporting the social transformations taking place. A type-technological research activity, which aims to propose innovative models of traditional spaces in terms not only of design, but also of their use, management, and equipping with devices for teleworking, as well as solar energy collection and natural cooling and heating systems, systems optimizing the control of solar radiation, reduction of water use, and harvesting and reuse of rainwater, separate waste collection, control of radiant heat exchanges, and protection from noise sources. This is the context of the research I have conducted with the DATA (Design, Architectural Technology, Territory, and Environment) Department on the rehabilitation of the Canada Real Galiana slum in Madrid, to be carried out through densification, energy and architectural retrofitting of the existing buildings, and the addition of new lightweight buildings, like zero-energy “plug-ins”, with the aim of improving the quality of living and the ecological, energy, and environmental performance in the shantytown.