Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ety and public administrations, and eventually what interventions can be
considered most sustainable, after placing them in relation to other
hypotheses of an entirely different nature.
Are we sure, for example, that the costs of an energy retrofit to an exist-
ing building, which in Italy are in the range of one-third of the cost of new
construction
10
, are effectively sustainable if we add the costs of retrofitting
the same buildings to resist seismic action?
In many cases it is necessary to establish points of equilibrium between
disciplines within the same macrodisciplinary field. However, often, as this
volume attempts to demonstrate, there is a tendency in particular choices to
omit a number of determinant implications deriving from priorities dictat-
ed by diverse scientific fields, to establish the convenience or inconven-
ience of an action of
building regeneration
.
When we pass from the scale of the building to that of the city, each sin-
gle intervention must be able to condition and offer benefits to society in
general.
We must identify forms of sustainable intervention, for which there
exists a tool suitable to evaluate their effectiveness in relation to the diverse
conditions present in a given territory.
An interesting pilot project has been realized in the Portuguese city of
Porto. The
Arrebita! project
proposes the activation of a process for the
restoration of an abandoned part of the city through forms of participative
action, bringing together various stakeholders and working with economic
sustainability (“
a collaborative system that allows for the refurbishment of
derelict buildings free of cost”
)
11
.
Public administrations consider the need to refurbish abandoned parts of
the city a primary objective; this is accompanied by aspects of energy sav-
ings, now both urgent and unavoidable that, coupled with the current eco-
nomic crisis, render any form of project financing difficult to believe in [1].
In Europe, experiences of
energy retrofitting
involving public build-
ings, almost always the object of European financing, are currently being
evaluated to verify the relationships between costs and benefits in terms of
energy savings
. One example involves a large district in East Berlin, entire-
ly refurbished and the object of significant financial investments
12
. In both
cases, even though very different, we are witness to a prevalence of the
10
One example in support of these data is the energy retrofitting of the Mathematics building of
the School of Science and Technology at the University of Camerino, designed by the spin-off
PEnSY, at a cost of approximately 350 Euros/m
2
.
11
Arrebita! Porto is the social entrepreneurship project winner of the competition “FAZ— Ideias
de Origem Portuguesa” organized by two major philanthropic foundations in Portugal, the
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and the Fundação Talento. The aim of the competition was to
summon the often neglected expatriate community and challenge it to come up with ideas for the
development of their homeland (http://www.arrebita.org/files/Arrebita_info_EN.pdf).
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