CIRCULAR RETROFIT

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269134

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NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS RISING STARS : concepts or ideas submitted by young talents (aged 30 or less)

Project title

CIRCULAR RETROFIT

Full concept/idea title

Description

The project’s aim is to identify new circular and sustainable retrofit strategies, and to apply them to restore a complex of seven social housing buildings, dating back to the 70s and located in the outskirts of Tortona, in the North West of Italy. The core idea is to adopt circularity and sharing of resources to pursue environmental and social sustainability and to improve the architectural quality of social housing buildings.

Where is your concept/idea being developed or intended to be implemented in the EU?

Please provide a summary of your concept/ idea

A massive rethink of the traditional retrofit strategies is crucial to avoid that the Renovation Wave will be implemented only as an improvement in energy efficiency with standardized architectural results, as it is already happening in Italy nowadays. Building stock regeneration must be the opportunity to re-design our buildings to made them more inclusive, more resilient to climate and social changes and to reduce environmental and economic impacts during their whole life cycle.       With those objectives in mind, this project aims to identify new circular and sustainable retrofit strategies, and to apply them to restore a complex of seven social housing buildings, dating back to the 70s and located in the outskirts of Tortona, in the North West of Italy. The core ideas of the project research are the circularity and the sharing of the resources used in the retrofit. The main retrofit actions are: the implementation of a second skin that includes solar panels, the design of new reconfigurable flat layouts, the addiction of flexible spaces to transform living spaces and the façade image, the creation of new shared services, spaces and green areas. We need to underline that, inside the project, circularity and sharing of resources will play a key role not only in environmental and economical sustainability but also regarding social inclusion, architectural regeneration, and long-time management of social housing buildings.

Please give information about the key objectives of your concept/idea in terms of sustainability and how these would be met

The main goal in terms of sustainability is to reduce environmental impact of the buildings, not only during the usage phase, but considering the overall life cycle. This will mean, not only to upgrade the plants including renewable resources and to improve the performance of the building envelope, but also to promote close and sustainable cycles for the components involved in the refurbishment. During the re-design of the building spaces, the choice has been to maintain as much as possible the main structures and existing materials to minimize the C&DW. For example, modular interior walls, easy to disassemble and to reconfigure, can be reused in future transformations of the building, avoiding demolitions waste, usage of new resources and further environmental impact. The building elements used in the project, like the façade cladding, have been chosen to contain high percentages of recycled materials, to be durable, easy to maintain and at the end of their life cycle reusable or fully recyclable, without losing value. A key feature of the project is to favor and support closed material loops, through the application of circular business model “product as a service”, promoting rental, maintenance, and factory recollection for regeneration, or recycle of materials at the end of their life cycle. In detail, this will be applied for solar panels and laundry machines, but the aim is to extend this idea to the management of the whole social housing complex. In the development of the project a central role has been played by the life cycle assessment tool (LCA). This evaluation allows to analyze the environmental impact of the life cycle of materials and building elements used in the retrofit, and to guide the design choices toward circular and truly sustainable solutions. Furthermore, the project wants to promote the culture of reuse and share through common spaces, shared utilities and goods and the creation of a shared workshop to encourage self-made repairs.

Please give information about the key objectives of your concept/idea in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these would be met

The key objective in term of quality and beauty of this project is to avoid that the renovation wave will bring to an architectural and aesthetic standardization of the existing building stock and of our outskirts. Renovation should be an opportunity to re-design the image of the cold, anonymous and often degraded architectures of the outskirts and of the social buildings, highlighting the variety and richness of contexts and inhabitants. This retrofit project, indeed, want to pursue a comprehensive improvement of the living and architectural quality of social housing. The apartments have been designed to satisfy the actual and future needs of the users, improving comfort, brightness and contact with the outside. This result has been reached also thanks to the design of additional spaces on the existing façade, that extend living spaces of the flats giving an extra flexible room of 14 m2 that can be used all year long. Those additional spaces can be easily transformed in winter gardens during the cool season and in terraces in summertime. Besides that, these additions transform the façade in an ever-changing architectural puzzle of domestic customized spaces, clearly in contrast with the common alienating facades of popular buildings. The creation, inside the project, of a wide green areas of 2500 m2 instead of the existing underused and paved car parking is a key feature to improve living and architectural quality of the buildings complex. In such a way, the ground floor and the big internal courtyard are transformed in a green platform able to host activities, common spaces, and shared services for all the inhabitants.

Please give information about the key objectives of your concept/idea in terms of inclusion and how these would be been met

The key objective in terms of inclusion is to reduce poverty, meant as the lack of a basket of fundamental goods and services, and to fight social and economic inequalities. The idea is to allow the most vulnerable population groups to have access to appropriate housing spaces of architectural quality and basic services. Another challenge of this project is indeed to reduce housing inequalities, isolation, and social immobility typical of difficult outskirts ad huge social housing blocks, stressed also by the current pandemic. The project includes the creation of shared utilities, managed as rental services by local suppliers, like car/van and bike sharing, coin laundries and workshops with shared tools. The design of common spaces and areas, like the park, vegetable gardens, recreational areas, co-working and small gyms is intended to extend living spaces of private housings and to create places for sociability. Especially in this pandemic time, the presence of outdoor spaces and common places with huge opening windows and flexible furniture become even more important. Besides that, the easiness to reconfigure the flats layouts, allows, in term of social inclusion, to optimize the living spaces to accommodate a broader range of people. Nowadays the social housing buildings in object of the study present only flats that fit for a traditional family of four members, reflecting the society structure at the time of their construction. In this way categories like disabled and large families do not find adequate accommodation and many elders living alone found themselves in too big and too expensive flats. So, by increasing the number of different housing typologies, will be possible to include target people now excluded from social housing assignation process and also to favor the economical accessibility to social housing. Besides that, flexible and adaptable layouts give the building resilience towards future society changes.

Please explain the innovative character of your concept/ idea

The principles of circular economy, usually considered as quite abstract and, so far, applied almost uniquely to new constructions, have been implemented here in specific retrofit strategies to regenerate social housing complexes. For example, elements like adaptability and flexibility of living spaces and the use of internal walls easy to reconfigure, before mainly considered in new buildings, are here experimented in the contest of existing buildings. To avoid that a shallow approach toward resources circularity would promote unsustainable choices and action, giving rise to diffuse “green washing” phenomena, the project uses the life cycle environmental evaluation (LCA) to verify the actual environmental sustainability of the adopted circular strategies.  This work also wants to test the application of circular economy as propulsive engine to promote social inclusion by the introduction of shared spaces and services, in marginalized and disadvantaged areas. In fact, since now, circular strategies and share economy has been focusing only on the economic and environmental advantages, leaving out the social potential. Finally, another innovative feature of the project is to experiment the circular business model of ‘building as a service’ as a frame to promote and develop circular strategies, to draw out new opportunities in the regeneration and management of social housing and to build networks among the service providers and volunteer associations already present at local level.

Please detail the plans you have for the further development, promotion and/or implementation of your concept/idea, with a particular attention to the initiatives to be taken before May 2022

The future perspective of the project is to further develop and deepen the cooperation with the proprietary and managing institution ‘ATC Piemonte Sud’ and with the section ‘Care and Family Services’ of the local municipality of Tortona. The latter have performed a capillary survey of the users and typologies of social housing on the local territory; those data where crucial for re-designing the living spaces taking care of the actual and future needs of the users. For what concerns the design of common spaces, my idea is to involve people living in the buildings in a participated design process to better define their characteristics and intended use, without forgetting flexibility and adaptability in time. To really implement the shared services, an important future step will be to contact and start a dialogue with the local services suppliers and volunteer associations already operating in the zone, that has been already identified. Furthermore, I will perform an economic evaluation of the planned retrofit activities and of their management in time using the life cycle method (LCC). This assessment will be essential to test a convenient and concretely applicable circular business model and to realize, even partially, the project. Indeed, the initial phase of the retrofit intervention could be implemented as pilot project in just one of the seven buildings of the social housing complex, and in future it could be scaled-up to the other buildings, thanks to national or European funding.

By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that the proposed concept/idea has not been proposed for the New European Bauhaus Rising Stars Awards more than once in the same category.