Environmental High Performance Urban Open Spaces Paving: Experimentations in Urban Barriera (Turin, Italy)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the experimentation on environmental high performance urban paving for open space re- design in Urban Barriera program framework in Turin (Italy). Urban Barriera is a program designed to trigger a process of improvement of the “Barriera di Milano” area, the historical neighborhood in the northern part of the city. It was supported by the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region and the European Community, in order to operate on physical, economic, social aspects of the city by encouraging collaboration and proactive interaction between all actors and beneficiaries of urban redevelopment. Particular attention is given to the issue of re-design of urban open spaces, as an instrument for regeneration of the district also from the social point of view. The phase of competitive tender was preceded by a research on environmental high performance paving characterized by good properties related to solar absorption/reflection and permeability, selecting one of this materials for the redevelopment of public open space. In this work, the microclimate conditions of three urban areas were compared, with similar characteristics of morphological urban shape of buildings’ surround but different paving materials. The experimentation started with microclimate monitoring to evaluate outdoor thermal comfort; interviews on citizens and the calculation of thermal comfort indexes completed the analysis. Some of the thermal comfort indexes used are intended for outdoors spaces, but others were developed starting from indoor indexes. A first investigation on the correlation between outdoor thermal comfort indexes and subjective thermal perception have been conducted. The results of this paper analyse thermal comfort conditions during summertime with different paving materials and compare thermal comfort indexes with the subjects’ response. Some considerations on procedural aspects of an ordinary competitive tender concluded the study.