Search Results (17)

Historically, bell towers have been religious and architectural symbols in the landscape that summoned the faithful to celebrations and fulfilled a crucial territorial significance task. This function was assumed by the towers of some universities. The real need of the University Francisco de Vitoria to build a bell tower for its new chapel and to be significant both for its campus and the city is the pretext to investigate the need for this element in the current context through an academic exercise with architecture students. Traditionally, the religious autority proposed a concrete celebration space. In this case, architecture students were commissioned to propose a contemporary response for the new bell tower of their university campus through a Design Workshop. The workshop result raises interesting questions about what the architecture of a bell tower should be like in the XXI century, the relationship with public space, the construction of a landmark on an urban scale, the need to respond to both the city and the immediate environment at its different scales, the obsolescence of elements such as clocks or bells, and, above all, the relevance of symbols and the way that architecture raises questions in the contemporary landscape. Full article

Encouraged by the administration, the gen9otrification process has been useful in economic terms for the reactivation of the socio-cultural fabrics of historic urban spaces in decline. What was initially considered an advantage has led to the touristification of historic centers, and in turn to the alteration of their original use. In these settings, the demographic void caused by increasingly shunning local identity has combined with pressure from excessive tourism and the obsolescence of heritage protection bodies in charge of conservation. Given the crisis affecting the definitions of the current system, this study aims to review the environmental agents of heritage value in relation to the processes of touristification and gentrification. Data obtained from different methodologies are analyzed using a multidisciplinary database, a model which enables the analysis of the relevant information from the different interacting fields. This case study focuses on the historic town center of Seville, specifically between 2015 and 2020. Elements are defined as indicators for these processes and the analysis of this case study will comprise the main results of this research. Full article

The Italian residential building stock consists of 12.2 million buildings, with 7.2 constructed post-World War II during the economic boom. These structures were designed without specific regulations for seismic safety, fire resistance, and energy efficiency, and today lies the current state of strong obsolescence. Therefore, energy refurbishment may not always be the best cost/benefit solution due to these intrinsic issues. Consequently, the transition to construction systems based on circular economy principles brings new opportunities and becomes key to proposing replacement interventions for this heritage. This paper presents a comparative GIS-based bottom-up approach to evaluate the lifecycle impact of residential building blocks, encompassing energy, environmental, and economic aspects. Two tools are introduced: one for measuring energy consumption and the other for quantifying the quantities of materials stored in buildings. This methodology permits comparing the new circular buildings and different refurbishment scenarios to identify the most suitable solution from an environmental impact and financial point of view. The application of a case study, a residential urban block in Bologna, built in 1945–1965, highlights how the demolition and reconstruction scenario based on circular economy principles presents the lowest environmental impacts and is economically competitive compared to standard deep renovation techniques. Full article

The designation of which resources are valued as emerging heritage is at a turning point. This has resulted in urban heritage regeneration processes designed from the top down, neglecting the perception of the local. This article highlights the importance of generating participatory multi-actor spaces where the knowledge of agents involved in the same process of urban regeneration, in this case linked to heritage in obsolete neighborhoods, can be incorporated and contrasted. The San Pablo neighborhood in Seville, built in the 1960s, is chosen as a case study. Actor–network theory is taken as a methodological basis for articulating a network with the voices of agents involved in heritage regeneration processes in obsolete neighborhoods. A methodology designed from the bottom up is put into practice, having as a base the social agents, followed by the academy, and finally with the technical knowledge of official institutions. This research concludes that incorporating the elderly population as social agents in regenerative actions in the San Pablo neighborhood is a determining factor in characterizing its uniqueness. Collective memory naturally associates resources that are part of the social identity of the neighborhood. Due to its deep roots, the older population recognizes different elements that could be protected and possibly recognized as emerging heritage, and that technical agents should consider them to achieve sustainable regeneration. Full article

China is gradually shifting towards more sustainable urban development, and the local governments are increasingly promoting social and environmentally sustainable spatial planning practices. This article debates the potential contradiction between the goal of a constantly growing urban population and the limits to the consumption of land planned by this new direction of urban development. The analysis focuses on the wealthy city of Suzhou in the Yangtse River Delta region and explores the opportunities for densification of the residential areas as a possible solution for this contradiction, as already tested by some Chinese cases for land use efficiency. The research applies GIS-based spatial analysis and identifies some of the sites that can be efficiently redeveloped in the resettlement communities for their low floor area ratio (FAR) and obsolescent conditions, which do not correspond to the increasingly middle-class status of the residents in the urban region. The article investigates the different options of a densification strategy in the frame of the policies of urban renewal promoted in China in recent years for improving the quality of the built environment. Full article

Waste generated from electric and electronic equipment (WEEE) is increasing rapidly due to the high demand for appliances, rapid product obsolescence, coupled with rapid economic growth, urbanization and technology advancement. Setting up a proper WEEE management system, which ensures better collection, treatment, recycling and control of transboundary movement of waste is crucial to increasing resource efficiency, improving sustainable production, use and consumption, and promoting the circular economy in Jordan. However, this system requires proper assessment of WEEE generation rates and reliable figures. Estimation of historical and future electric and electronic equipment put on market (EEE POM) and WEEE generation rates in Jordan have been achieved using the population balance model (PBM), logistic growth model (LGM) and Weibull distribution from 2000 to 2050. It is expected that the total disposal of appliances will reach about 1.6 million units (53 kt) in 2022, double this figure by 2044 and hit around 5 million units (175 kt) in 2050, with increasing WEEE generation rates. This is combined with the changing composition of WEEE with time. Thus, a rapid increase of WEEE in the near future is expected; this increase requires close monitoring and immediate response to tackle this hazardous waste. Full article

The demographic, political, social and economic evolution of the last 40 years has shown how difficult it has been for the residential architecture of the 1960s to adapt to the needs of the turn of the century, in many cases suffering abandonment by the administration and the citizens themselves. However, these architectural ensembles, grouped together in the so-called “barriadas” (neighbourhoods), represented a change of era and a conceptual transformation in the way the city was built. This has led various international organisations to consider the need to study and protect them. The El Plantinar neighbourhood, located in the city of Seville, is one of these architectural complexes that are in a situation of vulnerability. The aim of this article is to propose a research methodology that, from different scales and with the incorporation of new players, allows us to understand these modern assets in their maximum dimension and to define their unique heritage. The methodology is structured in two phases. In the first phase, a general study of the neighbourhood is carried out on three scales: urban, object-typological and perceptive. In the second phase, the cultural attributes of the urban ensemble, of a patrimonial nature to which values can be assigned, are identified. The results provide very heterogeneous attributes that contribute to enrich the neighbourhood beyond the traditional scientific-technical and objectual vision that accompanies the assets of the modern period. The conclusions indicate that a methodology that takes into account different approaches and scales is necessary to incorporate these neighbourhoods solidly into the heritage landscape. Full article

This research deals with the issue of the recovery of the historic urban fabric with a view towards ecological transition, nowadays considered the preferable direction of sustainability for the reform of the house–city–landscape system. The massive incentives provided by the Italian government for sustainable building, in view of the post-pandemic economic recovery, risk being reduced to mere support for the real estate sector, which turns the financial transfer from the public into an increase in asset value for the private sector. Such an incentive system could contradict the original function of the city, which is to be the privileged place for social communication and the creation of the identity of settled communities. A process of property development that disregards the distribution of income favors the most valuable property, thus increasing the socioeconomic distance between centrality and marginality. The latter is a condition that often characterizes the parts of the historic city affected by extensive phenomena of physical and functional obsolescence of the built heritage, and it is less capable of attracting public funding. The increase of building decay and social filtering-down accelerates the loss and involution of neighborhood identities; the latter constitutes the psycho-social energy that helps preserve the physical, functional and anthropological integrity of the city, due to the differences that make its parts recognizable. This study, with reference to a neighborhood in the historic city of Syracuse (Italy), proposes a model of analysis, evaluation and planning of interventions on the buildings’ roofs, aimed at defining the best strategy for ecological–environmental regeneration. The model presented allows one to generate a multiplicity of alternative strategies that combine different uses of roofs: from the most sustainable green roofs, but that are less cost-effective from the identity and landscape point of view; to the most efficient photovoltaic roofs from the energy–environmental point of view; and up to the most cost-effective ones, the vertical extensions with an increase in building volume. The proposed tool is an inter-scalar multidimensional valuation model that connects the multiple eco-socio-systemic attitudes of individual buildings to the landscape, identity, energy–environmental and economic overall dimensions of the urban fabric and allows one to define and compare multiple alternative recovery hypotheses, evaluating their potential impacts on the built environment. The model allows the formation of 100 different strategies, which are internally coherent and differently satisfy the above four perspectives, and it provides the preferable ones for each of the five approaches practiced. The best strategy characterizes most green roofs, 427 out of 1075 building units, 277 blue roofs, 121 green–blue roofs and 46 grey roofs. Full article

The relationships and interactions between rural and urban spaces have long been of interest in the territorial sciences. However, the approaches taken to these questions have evolved in line with the changing characteristics of the two types of territories, reflecting new relationships and structures. From these premises, we update the concept of rural–urban interaction by means of an extensive bibliographic review, which, among other results, highlights: (1) the profound change that has taken place in recent years in rural–urban interaction through processes such as de-agrarianisation, the tertiarisation of the economy and improvements in transport and communication infrastructures; (2) the resulting obsolescence of earlier typologies and procedures focused on discrimination between rural and urban environments, rather than on the interaction between them; (3) the difficulty of establishing valid, widely applicable typologies, given the profound differences in terms of (a) the scale and content of the statistics available in each country and (b) the territorial background in terms of economic functions and the characteristics, ancient and modern, of human settlement; (4) the predominance of an urban-centric approach, to the detriment of more traditional rural functions, such as agriculture, the importance of which is diluted by its low relative weight in terms of employed population and contribution to GDP. Consideration of these findings leads us to propose a new approach to the question of rural–urban interaction, reflecting the multifunctionality of rural spaces, and we identify useful areas for future research. Full article

In recent decades, the issue of existing buildings’ energy retrofit has played a central role in the context of international and national territorial development policies, mainly due to the obsolescence state that characterizes the housing stock. Since the current need for energy renovation collides with the widespread low spending capacity of the owners, in recent years numerous fiscal incentives have been envisaged, aimed at promoting building initiatives for the improvement of energy performance indices. With reference to the Italian fiscal measure so-called Superbonus, introduced by the “Relaunch” Law Decree No. 34/2020, in the present research, a model for evaluating the economic benefits, in terms of the convenience of the operators involved, generated by energy requalification interventions, has been proposed. The analysis has been developed with regards to the Italian territory and to the prevailing building typology, by considering 110 provincial capitals and the main urban areas into which each city is divided (central, semi-central, and peripheral). Specifically, for each urban area of the Italian capitals considered, the market value differential between the after energy and before energy intervention situations has been firstly determined. Furthermore, assuming an ordinary profit margin of a generic investor interested in this type of investment, the break-even incentive, i.e., the percentage threshold able to ensure the condition of minimum convenience for an investor, has been estimated for each urban area. Full article

Trolleybus systems are resurfacing as a steppingstone to carbon-neutral urban transport. With an eye on smart city evolution, the study and simulation of a proper monitoring system for trolleybus infrastructures will be essential. This paper merges the authors’ engineering knowledge and sources available in the literature on designing and modeling catenary-based electric traction networks and performs a critical review of them to lay the foundations for proposing possible optimal alternatives. A novel multi-vehicle motion-based model of the DC catenary system is then devised and simulated in Matlab-Simulink, which could prove useful in predicting possible technical obstacles arising from the next-future introduction of smart electric traction grids, inevitably featuring greater morphological intricacy. The modularity property characterizing the created model allows an accurate, detailed, and flexible simulation of sophisticated catenary systems. By means of graphical and numerical results illustrating the behavior of the main electrical line parameters, the presented approach demonstrates today’s obsolescence of conventional design methods used so far. The trolleybus network of the city of Bologna was chosen as a case study. Full article

The transformation of mining and industrial spaces into tourist spaces is part of the debate surrounding the profound changes in the contemporary economies of developed European countries. The loss of competitive power of their traditional companies, the obsolescence of many manufacturing facilities, and the take-off of other industrial economies in remote parts of the world have led to the closure of thousands of mines and factories, with the approval of environmental groups. In some privileged places, these ex-industrialized spaces have recovered environmentally, been allocated aid for socio-economic reconversion, and reoriented the old mines and factories (now converted into industrial heritage), towards cultural and tourist uses. The successful examples of Ironbridge, Zollverein or Wieliczka, have created the illusion to managers, owners, and local population of being able to turn almost any ruin of the industrial and mining past into a tourist attraction. Starting in the 1990s, many ex-industrial spaces, which were far from the main urban centres, opted for this tourist transformation as a lifeline to slow down the loss of population and economic activities. Sometime after these projects of industrial tourism, the result can be evaluated with objective data that question the sustainability of the model and the resilience of these places. This paper focuses on questioning the sustainability and resilience of the tourist transformation of two former mining areas located in Spain (Almadén and Sabero), far from the axes of economic development. Full article

The reclassification of accommodation for tourism, understood as the change of tourist category or classification in terms of accommodation activity, is put forward as one of the ways to increase competitiveness in any establishment. So, recent regulation on planning, renovation and modernization of Tourism in Canary Islands established the need to increase the classification of the accommodation offering by restoring degraded tourist areas and renovating different public and private infrastructures. Using a case study methodology in this paper, the characteristics of the rehabilitation process undertaken in different touristic establishments of the coast of Gran Canaria, are analyzed, more specifically in Maspalomas-Costa Canaria destination. Comparative analysis of these cases presenting it as a rehabilitation model that allowed it to re-join the market, benefiting from the urban incentives policies through the upgrading strategy, increasing the quality and quantity of the services offered. Full article

From a sustainable material management perspective, vacant houses represent material stock and still have potential in the circular economy. This article addresses two aspects of understanding and managing vacant houses: the difficulty of understanding their spatial and temporal patterns and the management of the social costs behind the phenomenon of vacant houses. These aspects are approached by combining a 4D GIS analysis with expert interviews and additional qualitative tools to assess the spatial and temporal dimension of vacant houses. Furthermore, this manuscript presents a tool to estimate the obsolete dwelling material stock distribution within a city. The case of the city of Kitakyushu demonstrates the relationship that exists between the historical trajectories of housing norms and standards, such as comfort, cleanliness, safety, and convenience, and the dynamics of the built material stock and demography for three selected neighbourhoods. The results show that the more locked-in a district is in terms of “obsolete norms and codes”, the more likely it is that the obsolete stock is dead, and consequently, urban mining should be considered. The article concludes that a revisiting of the norms and standards of convenience and other domains is one of the prerequisites of the transition toward a circular built environment and the prevention of obsolete stock accumulation. Full article