Michele Grimaldi

Green for the regeneration in sustainable urban planning

This work proposes a method for urban planning aimed at pursuing the sustainable regeneration of the central neighborhoods of the city through the reorganization of settlement patterns and the protection of its environmental heritage and biological resources. The design approach uses green spaces in all their various forms, increasing soil permeability, with a connecting system of the public spaces and institutions, increasing the energy efficiency of buildings and renewable sources in order to transform the city into a complex productive, livable and sensitive ecosystem. The application of the method focuses on the famous Barrios Pueblos of Guemes and Observatorio which are threatened by a flawed urban legislation that allows for the exclusive vertical development of residential buildings, thus affecting the urban equilibrium of these areas of significant historical value. The planning support methodology focuses on all the aspects related to the wider use of green materials within the city.

A methodology hazard-based for the mitigation of the radon risk in the urban planning

A type of significant impact is the risk from radon gas in indoor settings, which is not been yet listed among the types of risk canonically considered in planning, such as the hydrogeological, seismic and volcanic risk, by fires and relevant accident risk (Castelluccio et al, 2012). The radon is a radioactive gas, that was classified since 1988 by the WHO as a carcinogen of the Group I (IARC-WHO, 1988), i.e. an oncogenic factor proved on humans. The European Union, transposing these indications, requires to the Member States, through the EU Directive, 59, 2013, the identification of areas particularly prone to radon, known as radon prone areas in the literature. However, currently there is still no international standard for the mapping of these areas. Moreover, this Directive defers the mitigation of the phenomenon to the building regulations. This research shows a methodology to build the risk maps of radon at the urban scale, as you can regulate and specify mitigation actions only at this spatial level.

ISUT Model. A Composite Index to Measure the Sustainability of the Urban Transformation

The urban transformation is the result of several decisions made in a variety of temporal and spatial scales, which concern the field of urban planning regarding the location of buildings and activities, position of transport networks, that in fact are more persistent (Morris 1994). The urban transformation generates environmental impacts in terms of soil sealing, energy consumption and urban heat island (Ewing and Rong 2008), which result in consequences on stormwater runoff, on raising the temperature and increasing of CO2 emissions. From a representation of the state of the art, the present paper defines a composite index called ISUT (index of sustainability of the urban intervention). The ISUT covers all the essential components of the urban design that condition the energy balance equation (Parham and Fariborz 2010). The composite index value is used to propose better strategies to guide the development of local area plans in conjunction with the City’s Plan using an easy data-set which derives from the knowledge of the territory, which is usually already acquired for urban planning tools on a municipal basis.

An Integrated Energy Strategy for the Optimization of Retrofit Actions in Urban Planning

This research work aims at providing a methodology to analyze quantitatively energy sustainability of existing urban fabric and creating an urban energy system model as a decision support tool for the urban planning processes. Spatially resolved energy demand allows the identification of critical areas of energy consumption (CECA), in particular, a local-type spatial analysis has been adopted, GIS based, using a Kernel density estimation (KDE) and maps algebra. Within the CECA a simulation of energy consumption on an annual base for a representative building was carried out, in order to explore and estimate limits and vulnerabilities and to propose a hierarchy of energy-savings measures, addressing different scales of criticality in urban energy systems, from the city to district and block level.