Conference Agenda

The City of Buenos Aires lies on a regular grid of square blocks, following the traditional ‘Law of Indies’. Due to large immigration waves from Europe during the 20th century, the city went through a very rapid densification process leading to constant changes in the building regulations to meet housing needs. Therefore, the city is currently composed by a mix of buildings responding to all different regulations, resulting in a very irregular urban landscape. By contrast, the current building regulation proposes an extremely regular model, by limiting buildable heights according to zoning and plot dimensions. This paper is a simulation-based study that explores the environmental performance of the ‘irregular’ actual built form and the ‘regular’ model following current building regulations. The method consists of three main steps: firstly, the city’s urban layout is studied, identifying the most common block orientation. Secondly, analytic studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of typical ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ blocks. Lastly, a redesign for the current urban block is proposed, engaging in reducing energy consumption per block and focusing specially on outdoor variety and comfort. This results in an effective ‘generic’ morphologic model, to be applied in the growth of low and mid-density blocks.

The current paper presents the activities carried out by a Working Group (WG2) within the frame of the COST Action CA16114 ‘RESTORE: Rethinking Sustainability Towards a Regenerative Economy’. The content is divided into two parts: a brief overview of the ongoing work within RESTORE, and a detailed analysis of the tasks performed in the Working Group tackling the Regenerative Design Process (RSD). With the term “Restorative Design”, is identified the activities of design, construction and building operation to regenerate the local natural systems to a healthy state and supporting their capability for self-organization and regeneration. The objective is thus to improve the built environment restorative quality, considering current and future climatic scenarios, focusing on the revision of the energy demand, and on the outdoor human comfort The paper presents a series of urban methods and design cases studies that engages in newer, continuous and healthy, relationship with the unique ‘place’ of intervention in light of climate adaptation. The envisaged results direct a change on the path of “to perceive” “to adapt” and “to develop” the urban environment and to define recommendations for science based interdisciplinary design processes.

Urban brownfield regeneration projects are complex operations that are not automatically sustainable. To facilitate the integration of sustainability issues in these projects, a recent research project led to the creation of an operational monitoring tool tested on case studies. Following this, we undertook interactions with the stakeholders of the case studies to confront the potential of the tool with the future end user’s point of view and the reality of the practice. This paper presents the method and results of these interactions. Essentially, it has been recognized that the tool could provide a valuable decision-making support throughout the transformation of urban brownfields into new sustainable neighborhoods. The inclusion of a monitoring tool into the management of these projects appears not only feasible, but realistic and desired.

The design of residential area is a complex urban design process involving multiple dimensions and shaping the physical form of the cities. The question of how the form meets the needs of all other dimensions while satisfying environmental performance requirements is discussed in this paper from the methodological point of view. A Factors System (FS) is built to organize the factors in different dimensions of the complex urban system to discover, demonstrate and describe the relevance between the formal & spatial factors and other ones. Based on the FS, the Width/Height ratio is found as an operational factor to relate the space characteristic with the environmental performance and also with economic, social, visual factors. Also a real case, a residential area in Nanjing City, China is chosen to verify the feasibility of the system and the operability of the Width/Height factor.