Abstract
In Italian cities and regions water and its built environment play a crucial role. Historical water infrastructures and water based production plants, which are associated to specific urban, maritime, lagoon, and fluvial landscapes, can define, thanks to their material and immaterial evidences, a solid basis for an eco-systemic approach to sustainable urban and regional development, toward the blue economy vision. Within this framework, the research is going to focus on retrofitting, reuse and enhancement of the Water Built Environment (WaterBE) in urban areas, as a comprehensive system of open spaces, structures and infrastructures with historical-architectural-industrial value. In detail, three investigation targets are considered: seaports, arsenals and river industrial settlements, all undergoing increasing physical and functional obsolescence due to the overcoming of the production models for which they were conceived. Their reintegration into the territories and communities they belong to requires the selection of appropriate and compatible functions, capable, on the one hand, of safeguarding the tangible and intangible meanings from the Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca MUR - BANDO 2022 original building practices and organizational-managerial models, and, on the other, of optimizing and improving the intrinsic qualities of flexibility, robustness, reflexivity, redundancy and integration with respect to the possible occurrence of crisis conditions, through strategies validated in terms of technical-performance and socio-economic feasibility. From a methodological point of view, the proposal intends to pursue the aforementioned objectives through the development and validation of a workflow and a set of innovative digital solutions, starting from the qualification of the WaterBE and the assessment of its resilience in terms of both tangible features - morpho-typological, physical, construction, use, context - and intangible meanings - technical knowledge, trades and skills, corporate history, management methods. Therefore, retrofitting and reuse scenarios and meta-design strategies are proposed, oriented towards flexibility, robustness, reflexivity, redundancy and integration, verified in terms of technical-performance and socio-economic feasibility and validated through consultation with institutional stakeholders and education and training of users. On the basis of the achievable results, also through the application on paradigmatic pilot cases, the project intends to provide a series of operational tools and digital products, including benchmark models of the built water environment by GIS/BIM approach, a manual for the application of a resilience metric, a web atlas of compatible solutions and VR/AR training demonstrators, all integrated in the project tech-kit and transferred to the territory through demonstration activities of Virtual Demo-Lab for the optimisation of impacts in favour of technicians, authorities and citizens.
Results achieved
The central aim of RE3WORK was to provide scientifically grounded and operationally transferable tools to support the reintegration of the water built environment into the territories and communities. The research was structured around eight ORs: OR1. Analysis and typification of the WaterBE — Construction of a multi-level inventory and cataloguing system of water-related built heritage in port, arsenal and river contexts, with the definition of representative typologies (WaterBET – Water Built Environment Typology) as transferable archetypes for vulnerability analysis and the definition of risk-informed intervention strategies. OR2. Intangible values of the WaterBE — Study of the economic, organisational and managerial dimensions embedded in industrial water heritage, with reconstruction of the corporate and productive history of the sites and translation of intangible values into design guidelines for reuse strategies. OR3. Resilience assessment — Development of quantitative metrics for assessing the resilience of WaterBETs with respect to specific risk scenarios. OR4. Retrofitting and reuse meta-strategies — Definition of a repertoire of retrofitting and reuse meta- strategies oriented towards resilience and cultural enhancement, applicable to different WaterBE typologies. OR5. Intervention solutions and feasibility — Development of detailed design solutions on selected pilot cases, with assessment of functional compatibility and economic-institutional sustainability of alternative reuse layouts. OR6. Stakeholder engagement — Activation of consultation processes with institutional stakeholders — port authorities, local bodies, associations — for the participatory validation of risk mitigation strategies and reuse hypotheses. OR7. User preparedness and training — Increasing the preparedness, awareness and involvement of users with different profiles (e.g. rescuers, regular occupants, occasional visitors) with respect to characteristic risks in pre- crisis and emergency phases, through intuitive and persuasive training and communication solutions. OR8. Digital transition and tech-kit — Digital integration of the entire research process through a tech-kit of GIS/BIM/VR/AR tools.Results achieved
The results achieved substantially correspond to the objectives set out at the outset. The main outcomes are summarised below, grouped by thematic areas consistent with the structure of the ORs.Progetto finanziato nell’ambito del Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza PNRR - Missione 4 – Componente 2 – Investimento 1.1 “Fondo per il Programma Nazionale di Ricerca e Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN)” (Bando indetto con D.D. del MUR n. 104 del 02/02/2022). Knowledge and cataloguing of WaterBE (OR1 - OR2) The multi-level inventory and cataloguing system developed enabled the survey of 63 port areas managed by national Port System Authorities, 100 productive sites in the Nera river basin, and 4 naval arsenals of national relevance (OR1). The integration of inventory data with territorial and risk information systems led to the selection of flooding, explosion and abandonment as the main reference hazard scenarios for the three contexts analysed. On this basis, the WaterBETs were defined as transferable archetypes built through risk-oriented descriptors for port and river sites, and through criteria for characterising abandonment risk for arsenals. The study of intangible values (OR2) examined the economic, organisational and managerial dimensions embedded in industrial water heritage, through literature analysis and comparative analysis of international reuse cases. On the three project pilot cases — the Taranto Arsenal, the Port of Bari and the former Polymer site in Terni — design alternatives were formulated in line with the maturity of the heritization processes underway at each site. Resilience assessment (OR3) Resilience metrics calibrated on the three identified risk scenarios were developed. Application to the pilot case port WaterBET enabled the testing of structural and non-structural mitigation strategies, whose outputs gave rise to the ReWaterBETs: resilient typologies derived from assessment data, available as reference guidance for designers and public administrations. Design strategies and intervention solutions (OR4 - OR5) The project produced a retrofitting and reuse meta-strategy repertoire, organised across nine intervention dimensions: architectural, structural, socio-cultural, technological, environmental, economic, authenticity and historical, accessibility, and managerial-functional (OR4). This meta-design framework provides a transversal reference, applicable to different WaterBE typologies across diverse geographical and institutional contexts. Application to pilot cases produced detailed design proposals (OR5), including the pilot case carried out on the Palazzo della Dogana in the port of Bari, for which two reuse alternatives were developed. Stakeholder engagement and user training (OR6 - OR7) The activation of technical roundtables with institutional bodies such as the Port System Authority of the Southern Adriatic Sea enabled the integration of managing authorities' operational perspectives into the assessment of mitigation strategies and reuse hypotheses (OR6). For user training, VR environments differentiated by user profile were developed (OR7). For expert users, non-immersive virtual tours based on 360° spherical photography were produced, with a progressive layered consultation system covering: vulnerable element, strategy code, mitigation measure, technical details and compatibility with the reuse project. For non- expert users, immersive VR environments were developed featuring guided evacuation routes, identification of safe areas and hazards, and behavioural guidance for pre-crisis and emergency phases Integrated digital tech-kit (OR8) The tech-kit collects and operationalises the data and workflows developed in the previous project phases. The system is grounded in a GIS project incorporating the spatial and semantic structure of the water heritage cataloguing records and the WaterBETs. Building upon this, BIM models are developed at the scale of individual pilot case assets: informed by the inventory of meta-strategies (OR4), they define alternative reuse and intervention scenarios, evaluated through a multi-criteria approach with stakeholder involvement. These scenarios are complemented by VR/AR experiences for communicating heritage value, supporting consultation on the proposed solutions and providing risk awareness training.Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Paolo Ferri
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Scienze Aziendali
Coordinatore:
Politecnico di BARI(Italy)
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 43.941,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
17/10/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
