Abstract
The technological components regarding building cladding are designed for ensuring thermo-hygrometric comfort conditions within habitable spaces and realising smart buildings. Often the solutions adopted are identified referring only to the characteristics of mechanical and energy materials without considering the ecological–environmental properties in an urban context. Thus, it is appropriate to choose technological components not only according to material type, but also ecological aspects pursued through presence and/or structured integration of natural elements. The technical-design forms based on “building–nature” integration allows, on one hand, the sustainable soil use with multiple benefits (ecosystem services) that natural systems produce, on the other hand, the identification of technological solutions sized referring environmental quality levels achieved through appropriate natural species use. In this way, it can be obtained lower buildings investment and maintenance costs, and greater energetic–environmental benefits. So, it is proposed an evaluation protocol for settlement transformation interventions structured considering environmental effects obtained with Nature-Based Solutions (NBSs) into the project. According to ecological–environmental quality level achieved with NBSs, the technological component is sized according to preliminary design parameters (noise reduction and solar irradiation degree) obtained through NBSs. The total performance level of technological solutions is expressed using Economic–Environmental Indicators. The protocol is tested on social housing case in Anagnina district of Rome (Italy).
Highlights
Since the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, the need to create a better quality of life for people in the cities of industrialised and non-European countries and the progressive increase in awareness of the increasingly rapid climate changes produced by human activities have led to the search for and implementation of settlement transformation interventions inspired by principles of environmental sustainability and based on an efficient use of available resources. [1]
The first shared definition of sustainability contained in the Bruntland Report for the World Commission on Environment and Development [2]: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” has been supplemented by numerous variations, extensions and specifications [3], which led to consider as its founding elements: economic and social development and environmental protection that in a long-term perspective are Energies 2019, 12, 2659; doi:10.3390/en12142659
The systematic inclusion of new tree and/or shrub elements on portions of land to be regenerated; the realisation of Urban Forestry Projects allows pursuit of multiple objectives aimed at regulating the economy of the places, supporting the welfare of the population and provisioning to the protection of the environment and the rational use of land
Summary
Since the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, the need to create a better quality of life for people in the cities of industrialised and non-European countries and the progressive increase in awareness of the increasingly rapid climate changes produced by human activities have led to the search for and implementation of settlement transformation interventions inspired by principles of environmental sustainability and based on an efficient use of available resources. [1]. The concept of sustainable development is linked to ethical principles that look to long-term and intergenerational collective benefits in terms of maintenance, inheritance, nonexclusion, fair distribution of the amount of natural, social and economic capital used and consumed in human activities [4] From this point of view, the clear distinction between agricultural or forest areas and urbanised ones must be overcome, but these areas must be seen as open, interacting and continuous systems of varying intensity and consistency. According to European Environment Agency (EEA), the soil resource must be considered as an integrated system (land system) made of biophysical and human land subsystems [5] Based on this point of view, the components of land use and land cover are elements of same process of landscape transformation. This unified vision of the land defines alternative ways of using it through an integrated territory planning in relation to ecosystem services produced by natural element
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