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.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Paolo Ferri
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Scienze Aziendali
Coordinator:
Politecnico di BARI(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 43.941,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
17/10/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
