ABSTRACT
The contribution addresses the issue of the sustainable transformation of the urban and built environment through a reflection on the strategic and design opportunities for the renewal of public residential neighbourhoods. The state of the art, analysed in the first part of the article, consists of an examination of strategies, policies and good practices of urban sustainability, useful to define the analytical framework of the research, presented in the second part of the contribution. The theoretical perspective and the research results applied to the case study take into account the transformations induced by the global Covid-19 pandemic and is therefore placed in a post-pandemic perspective. Enabling technologies at the urban scale, related to mobility and urban and residential public spaces are addressed. At the architectural scale, the new spatial and technological needs of living are examined, which are combined with the need to renew the residential housing stock, now structurally and technologically obsolete. In the last part, the partial results of research applied to the case study of the INA CASA Sbarre Inferiori public housing estate in Reggio Calabria, the object of theoretical and design analysis, are presented. The contribution aims to highlight the design opportunities for this urban context with a view to ecological transition and sustainable development, showing how to design experimentation on the scale of the residential district can be readapted to the dimension of the village or small town. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The speech presents urban and domestic living and how these have been modified by the new needs, concerns and fears connected to the most recent global pandemic. The contribution highlights how urban and domestic dimensions are key elements of our existence and resistance. The present contribution aim to explore the assessment of "Indoor Environmental Quality"in the living space. The issue of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is highly underestimated in relation to the magnitude of the potential consequences on the healthiness of inhabited spaces. Today, the health effects associated with poor air quality in buildings are well known and classified, such as the Sick Building Syndrome, a symptomatic picture that occurs in many occupants of homes, offices, schools, hospitals, etc. equipped with mechanical ventilation systems and global air conditioning. A condition of adequate IAQ is absolutely achievable in new buildings, given the possibility of selecting appropriate materials, furnishings and technical systems, as well as design according to criteria of ventilation, hygrometric control and air quality of passive type.Greater difficulties are found on the built, where the options for intervention are complex and often related to significant economic burden. In these cases, a careful evaluation of the boundary conditions is necessary, in order to understand which problems can be solved with simple technical-design measures and which ones instead require substantial interventions, but which cannot be ignored if the polluting factor is particularly dangerous. The speach - also thanks to a wide comparative examination of studies, technical norms and international projects - provides an adequate knowledge of the problem as well as the tools for the evaluation of the different options and technical solutions able to guarantee the control through design choices in order to the specific material-constitutive characteristics and physical structure of the confined environment. © 2022 IEEE.