Silvia Tedesco

Sustainability of Living Wall Systems Through An Ecosystem Services Lens

The use of plants for shading the buildings having a pleasant ornamental effect is known for a long time. During the last decade, ecosystem services approach opens the way to analyze the multiple advantages that greening, included living walls, can provide to the urban environment. Regarding living walls, the main environmental benefits are heat island effect mitigation, noise pollution insulation, heating and cooling energy demand reduction, absorption of particulate matters, and enhancement of biodiversity. Living walls can also have a role in ameliorating physical and mental health and well-being and can be included in the urban horticulture initiatives both for food production and education purposes. Needing for recycled and low energy products for a greater environmental sustainability is also required in living wall systems (LWS). Therefore, the life cycle approach is considered as useful. The chapter is a critical review aimed at analyzing the environmental, social and economic sustainability of LWS for urban design. The multidisciplinary approach, carried out by agronomists and architects, allows to understand the problems and solutions for the improvement of the use of these systems in our cities. The research group is working on sustainable green wall systems that provide architectural and environmental benefits through the use of independent modular units, renewable materials, environmental friendly substrates, and native plants.

The Use of Hemp in Building Components for the Development of a Modular House in a Rural Area of Cauca—Colombia

Nowadays, people are looking for sustainable materials for construction industries due to many social, economic and environmental problems related to usage of non-renewable materials. The Colombian government and the main guerrilla group (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—FARC) has kept the development of rural areas as one of the principal task in their agenda. This work has been carried out to explore and analyze the different ways in which industrial hemp can be used in rural construction. The main focus is to develop a modular house prototype in the rural area of Toribio Cauca, by using industrial hemp as the main material. This will be used as a strategy for sustainable development of rural communities in the post-conflict period in Colombia.