A rapid acceleration in urbanization has appeared as an important by-product of the world’s globalization process, with the result that cities have now become man’s primary habitat. This development is both forcing urban environments to embrace increasing numbers of inhabitants, despite their often limited resources, and requiring 21st century architects and urban planners to quickly develop new ideas and new forms on how to direct the futures of global cities. Faced as they are by the challenges of sustainability, these architects and planners are exploring ways both to rehabilitate existing urban centers and come up with new modes of space production. This study concentrates on the concept of the smart city and explores these new approaches by considering the findings achieved by the IAAC Global Summer School, which was conducted at the ITU Faculty of Architecture in 2013. This summer school was conducted as a means in the investigation of new strategies for urban development and city production by focusing on such different aspects as the production of knowledge, production of food, production of objects, and the production of energy. In order to enhance the discussion of this development, this work looks at the method of exploration utilized and the ideas set forth by the architectural student participants and considers their suggestions for adaptive and reactive spatial infrastructures. The aim of this study is to the enable architects to enhance their spatial awareness while generating new ideas for the future of the city.
In Italian urban planning, the economic issues addressed in new high-rise settlements are mostly approached in the developer’s perspective. In private-public partnerships, investments sustainability is usually valued by public authorities in terms of construction costs, market prices and public works and infrastructures built by the private developers. In case of high-rise projects, the main aim of the public authority is to guarantee that the project be accepted by as many local residents as possible before the project even starts. In recent years, there has been an ever-growing focus on energy saving and sustainability for buildings. Italian regulation has generally approached these issues as far as building structures and materials are concerned, and in the most advanced regional urban legislation, it also focuses on the construction site. There does not, however, appear to be any attention paid to the sustainability of new developments as a whole. Italian zoning does not deal with the energy issues related to investment projects and their externalities, neither in urban development nor economic perspectives. The English Leed protocol, which focuses on urban sustainability evaluation, is barley used, and when it is, it is because the private developers has chosen to do so, not because it has been required by law. Not one public administration in Italy has yet to implement it. This paper investigates the economic issues related to energy consumption in new metropolitan areas, with specific reference to tall buildings and high density developments. Due to the specific construction typology, dimension and complexity, tall buildings might be considered as urban developments in their own right. More specifically, the paper discusses how the energy demand and consumption of a single building can affect the energy tradeoff of entire cities.
In this communication are reported the assumptions, methodology, outcomes and conclusions of a research carried out within the scope, of the revision of the Land, Territorial Ordinance and Urbanism Act, currently under way in Portugal. This is a deep revision, and it points out the importance of the economic and financial sustainability of urban development operations for municipalities. Land values rise as a result of territorial planning decisions. Thus a planned public intervention is required in order to assure these surplus values are allocated for the population’s social interest. Despite the existence of different kinds of land policies, the fiscal-based ones affect the most the market and land uses, and may substantially influence planning goals’ achievement. Land taxation aims at assuring a source of income to public administration; redistributing welfare so to grant land its social function; giving back to society the land surplus values that accrue from planning decisions and public investments; and increasing the provision of land for urban development. In order to recover part of the surplus values engendered by urban planning decisions, herein is proposed a new territorial management instrument, applied at the Municipal level. It consists in charging a 20% fee on the land value increase (surplus-value) that accrues from concrete building capacity/m2 assigned by plans to specific urban interventions. This fee will, later on, be used by the municipality on behalf of social purposes. The current proposal is applied, as a case study, to the Urban Development Plan of the Planning Unit 11 of the municipality of Lagoa, located in the Algarve (Portugal). The methodology pursued in the current study consists in the computation of the building capacity/m2, and of the surplus values and corresponding 20% fee that accrue from the establishment of that plan, to be charged to promoters and builders, in order to recover part of their unearned increments. This innovative territorial management instrument strengthens municipal’s economic and financial sustainability, clears up the origins and applications of municipal funds, and ensures that the surplus values engendered by plans are pointed to social purposes and not to specific private interests. The application of this urban fee may be easily extended to other municipalities, as it is founded on information and methodologies that stand inter-municipal comparisons. Besides, this kind of study supports municipal decisions on both urban development and economic-financial issues, in an integrated and sustainable way.
This paper presents the theoretical basis of the matrix method direct-applied to determine the heat losses of the building and harmonized with the requirements very urgent regulatory documents. Matrix method consists in drawing up a series of matrices with geometrical and thermal characteristics and their subsequent multiplication by the rules of linear algebra. Matrix method is the most accurate way to determine the transmission heat losses and, consequently, the required heating power, because linear and point thermal bridges attached in Annex E SP 50.13330.2012 ‘Thermal performance of the buildings’. The updated edition SNIP 23-02-2003 are taken into account. Tools of linear algebra allow to operate with a large data sets and take into account a number of different factors affecting the thermal balance of the building simultaneously. Matrix method is easily automated. Even the simplest tabular editors allow adapting them to write matrices and perform an operation of multiplication of matrices. In complex matrices using the opportunity to make up for the buildings detailed data array that is an information model of the thermal climate of the building is appeared. Approach realized by the matrix method corresponds the direction of development of science given at the federal level in Russian Federation – on energy saving and achieving maximal energy efficiency fully.
In the late twentieth century, the housing stock of Porto showed signs of social and urban imbalance. This characteristic is mostly due to the successive construction of large suburbs since the second half of the twentieth century, related to the ‘Piano de Melhoramentos’ (Plan of Improvements). These barrios concentrated thousands of families, economically disadvantaged, through a high concern for the amount of dwellings and a tiny concern for the environmental quality of these residential areas. Nevertheless, most of these large housing estates barrios were absorbed by the expansion of the city and, as a result, there was a significant improvement of access net, transports and service network, minimizing the isolation of these neighborhoods. In the nineties, social and economic problems of these populations were sharpened. Such problems are also related to the stigmatization phenomenon, compounded by a . generalized process of degradation of the public space and built space, which results from the lack of conservation and rehabilitation programs. The Municipality of Porto starts in 2004, together with the ‘Institute National da Habitagao’ (INH) a program for the rehabilitation of 5000 dwellings in municipal social housing and for the construction of 300 new dwellings under controlled costs. The article presents the study we have been developing concerning the best procedures that professionals and politicians should have when facing the renewal of the social housing barrios. These operations are very important for the social and urban balance, since about 20% of local people live in municipal dwellings. This financial effort aimed at the rehabilitation of the residential park underlines the policies of strengthening the social cohesion. Social actions at an educational, training, employment and social assistance levels should complement this effort. To illustrate this study we will present de ex- Ante and post analytic scenarios of the ‘Bairro de Contumil, in Porto.
