According to the Circularity Gap Report 2020, a mere 8.6% of the global economy wascircular in 2019. The Global Status Report 2018 declares that building construction and operationsaccounted for 36% of global final energy use and 39% of energy–related carbon dioxide (CO2)emissions. The Paris Agreement demands that the building and construction sector decarbonizesglobally by 2050. This requires strategies that minimize the environmental impact of buildingsand practices extending the lifecycle of their constituents within a circular resource flow. To ensurethat eective measures are applied, a suitable method is needed to assess compliance in materials,processes, and design strategies within circular economy principles. The study’s assumption is thatsynthetic and reliable indicators for that purpose could be based on reversibility and durabilityfeatures. The paper provides an overview of building design issues within the circular economyperspective, highlighting the diculty in finding circular technologies which are suitable to enhancebuildings’ service life while closing material loops. The results identify reversibility and durability aspotential indicators for assessing circular building technologies. The next research stage aims to furtherdevelop the rating of circularity requirements for both building technologies and entire buildings.
The VAMP project (VAlorization of building demolition Materials and Products, LIFE 98/ENV/IT/33) aims to build an effective and innovative information system to support decision making in selective demolition activity and to manage the valorization (recovery-reuse-recycling) of waste flows produced by the construction and demolition (C&D) sector. The VAMP information system will be tested it in Italy in some case studies of selective demolition. In this paper the proposed demolition-valorization system will be compared to the traditional one in a life cycle perspective, applying LCA methodology to highlight the advantages of VAMP system from an eco-sustainability point of view. Within the system boundaries demolition processes, transport of demolition wastes and its recovery/treatment or disposal in landfill were included. Processes avoided due to reuse-recycling activities, such as extraction of natural resources and manufacture of building materials and components, were considered too. In this paper data collection procedure applied in inventory and impact assessment phases and a general overview about data availability for LCA studies in this sector are presented. Results of application of VAMP methodology to a case study are discussed and compared with a simulated traditional demolition of the same building. Environmental advantages of VAMP demolition-valorization system are demonstrated quantitatively emphasizing the special importance of reuse of building components with high demand of energy for manufacture.
Green Building Rating Systems (GBRSs) are typically third-party, voluntary, and market driven standards that measure buildings’ sustainability level by multi-criteria assessment, and encourage the adoption of environmentally, socially and economically sustainable practices in design, construction and operation of buildings (or neighborhoods). GBRSs aim at guiding and assessing the project throughout all its life cycle, thus limiting the negative impact on the environment, as well as on the building occupants’ health and well-being, and even reducing operational costs. Hundreds of GBRSs are now available worldwide, varying in approaches, application processes, and evaluation metrics. BREEAM, CASBEE, Green Star and LEED are among the most applied worldwide. Despite some differences, they all adhere to the same general evaluation structure: project performances ares measured using a set of relevant indicators, grouped per topics such as water management, energy use, materials, site qualities. Each assessed requirement is assigned a score/judgment, the total of which determines the level of sustainability achieved. In addition to regular updates, a current trend is to improve the effectiveness of protocols, making them more comprehensive and accurate, while keeping them easy to use.
Smart City emerged as a reference concept to shape the city of the future, mainly by strengthening the connections between grids, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools, governance and people. 'Smart' refers to the potential benefit that is derived by adopting ICT to face the increasing complexity of city growth, which involves multiple urban scales, a number of different players and a variety of regulatory frameworks, as shown by several experiences worldwide in the past few decades. Compared to the potential that is expected to be fuelled by hyper-connected devices in delivering an efficient and optimized configuration of the urban ecosystem , the architecture of the city seems to have been relegated to the background. Facilitating an integrated management of the urban dynamics on both a large and a small scale is a key challenge. This means that the cross-related effects of decisions and behaviours must be identified, mapped and analysed considering their relations, reciprocal influences and conflicts. Although an effective ICT infrastructure should facilitate this purpose, the number of variables to consider is enormous, due to both top-down and bottom-up strains, which can act simultaneously on a large palette of fields, with multiple and combined issues as well. In order to design a model on which a tool for management can be built, a simplified scale of analysis is needed: the 'district' seems to represent an acceptable intermediate portion of the whole city where local and global phenomena can be observed from a perspective of their interferences and potential synergies. It often also corresponds to an administrative entity as well as to a structured place recognized by citizens and inhabitants. This article reports on a study conducted in the city of Bologna by a team of researchers of the University of Bologna-Department of Architecture. The study aimed at supporting the municipality in defining effective strategies to implement the Smart City Vision by a set of coordinated actions of regeneration at district level. The research aimed at coupling holistic design principles and the typical ICT platform architecture into an inter-operable tool that could enable the management of the key features of a district in separate layers, supplemented by different data sets. A significant part of the research has been devoted to identifying the variables involved and defining the methodology to process them, according to the most up-to-date shared definitions and indicators.
The literature shows a lack of environmental indicators able to support the transition from a sustainable to a smart city framework, since the priority area “built environment” is indeed more comprehensively addressed by urban sustainability assessment systems (13%), than by smart city frameworks (4%) [12]. As “smaller cities inside a larger agglomerate” [19], urban districts play a key role in defining effective and innovative paths toward a smarter city, but defining a sustainable urban district is not straightforward, and even less is capturing the induced impacts due to interactions between individual buildings and their surround urban setting [23]. The adoption of a quantitative method for evaluation, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), emerges as an essential step for this purpose [24]. This article explores the application of a streamlined LCA on the urban district main issues (buildings, energy, water and waste), referring to an urban retrofitting intervention of Bolognina neighbourhood. A set of mitigation strategies developed by an interdisciplinary research group (joining researcher team from the Department of Architecture of the University of Bologna and Institute of Sustainability in Civil Engineering of the RWTH Aachen University) provides the reference framework for the application deepened within the article. This work is a first application of LCA to a case study but it not includes a comprehensive sustainability framework yet, further activities are planned to finalize the analysis, e.g. taking account of social dimension by applying Social Life Cycle Assessment.
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