1,720,962 research outputs found
“Fit to 55”: Financial Impacts of Italian Incentive Measures for the Efficiency of the Building Stock and the Revitalization of Fragile Areas
No full textStarting from the strategic initiative presented in 2020 by the European Commission and entitled “A wave of renovations for Europe: greening buildings, creating jobs and improving lives”, Member States are now committed to stepping up efforts to renovate their building stock, with the precise goal of achieving climate neutrality in 2050. With the aim of exploring the potential appeal of incentive measures, the paper started with some considerations on the use and ownership of the building stock in Italy, frequently with a lack of maintenance. The proposed method, set up in three successive steps, verifies (for a hypothetical owner) the procedural feasibility and the financial sustainability of a new recent measure of energy efficiency, the Superbonus 110%. The selected case study is a complex of three buildings, built between the sixties and seventies in response to the strong demand for second homes and located in a small mountain municipality in the North-West of Italy. The results showed that the intervention allows, on the one hand, energy efficiency and, on the other hand, the initial and long-term convenience for the owner. However, a common strategy is needed for such policies, which -if left to the actions of individuals- may counteract the current potential for territorial resilience that seems to stimulate, especially in fragile territories
Surfacing Values Created by Incentive Policies in Support of Sustainable Urban Development: A Theoretical Evaluation Framework
Full text linkThe development of sustainable cities involves improving the performance of the built environment and its effects on its context as one of the multiple intervention points. Indeed, outlining and implementing building artefacts does not constitute a simple act of generating a physical place, but represents a process that cannot ignore the positive and/or negative impacts that these transformations can have on the environment and societies in which it is embedded. Since in a profit-driven logic, a private investor's interest in environmental and social values may be limited in favour of economic value, a positive push towards urban sustainability can be found in government-promoted fiscal building incentives. Indeed, these tools offer direct actions for more favourable urban conditions, supporting private entities in meeting the intervention costs. This paper aims to define a theoretical evaluation framework through which the "sustainable" value creation potential of building incentives can be assessed. Through this framework, the research analysed the main Italian building incentives, observing how they support the creation of economic, environmental, and social values for the benefit of society, the environment, and urban areas. This paper discusses the usefulness of the framework in supporting public actors in the potential revision, definition, and communication of such incentive policies
INDIRECT GREEN FAÇADE SYSTEMS: A PROPOSAL OF A GLOBAL PERFORMANCE INDICATOR FOR IN/OUT EVALUATION
No full textAll the recent studies about green buildings agree upon the importance of their environmental sustainability. This goal finds confirmation also through the recent green building assessment tools, which give higher rating points to environmental aspects of sustainability. Certainly the increase of buildings performances, thanks to an efficient use of energy, water and materials, or waste and CO2 emission reduction, is a tangible way to reduce environmental impact, but it couldn’t be enough in high-density urban areas, where climate change due to global warming intensifies air pollution, surface temperatures and heat island effects (UHI).
Therefore, each green building should enhance its environmental contribution, but only if it’s part of a well-balanced urban scale green planning, pointing to urban biodiversity enhancement, ecosystems protection and vegetation improvement as well. It’s not trivial at all to point out that façades are the visual and behavioral joining link between buildings and the environment: from this perspective, façades need to take off their traditional function of partition between indoor and outdoor, to rather become an active and dynamic interface capable to maximize environmental buildings performances.
Even if there isn’t an explicit relationship between green building and “vegetal skin”, Vertical Greenery Systems (VGS) represent by now a recognized and strategic way to reduce the overall impact of the built environment, especially in urban areas that have typically limited availability of horizontal spaces at street level for urban greening.
This paper highlights the advantages of Indirect Green Façades in both the cases of new and existing buildings, and proposes a global performance indicator for their evaluation. While green roofs are an established technology in construction and assessment of buildings, green façades still find difficult to develop. The introduction of a global performance indicator for Indirect Green Façades could encourage the adoption of this technology in urban regeneration actions, also for low quality building stock typically concentrated in suburban areas, to improve the city image as well.
Hopefully, this indicator could be then implemented in several green building assessment tools and will contribute to spread the VGS culture
Mapping maintenance regulations: a methodological framework to improve territorial resilience
No full textNowadays, in the entire world, we can clearly see the effects of climate changes. Indeed, during the last twenty years, climate-related and geophysical disasters killed around 1.3 million people and left a further 4.4 billion injured, homeless, displaced or in need of emergency assistance. From this framework, it is clear that we need policies to improve the resilience of our cities.
Those ones are only some components of a more complex system that includes also natural elements, i.e. the territory. Therefore, in order to improve the resilience of the cities we must work on it at first, looking for those practices able to maintain it in an efficiency state and consequently ready to react upon the occurrence of natural events.
It is for this reason that in the research here summarized we decided to focus on the existing regulations wondering in which ways they could be useful to achieve our purpose.
Knowing that between 1998 and 2017 floods were about 43.4% of all the disasters, we decided to focus on the hydraulic risk with explicit reference to the Italian case. Through a methodological analysis of the national, regional and municipal regulations, it was possible to structure a detailed state of art in terms of tasks and responsibilities, clarifying, in particular, the hierarchy of public or private bodies. The outline drawn up highlights links, overlapping regulations and open areas, which are considered relevant to be regulated and improved. In the end, a useful tool for the coordination of the institutions in the operations of ordinary and extraordinary maintenance is proposed
Green perspectives for Italian buildings façades
No full textAlthough the theme has been studied for more than a decade, the green transformations of buildings are limited in practice and often new buildings, by large private or public estates, promoted and publicized it to gain public support. Is it possible to think about a widespread action to "green" our cities? If in other European countries the responsive-ness to this issue is certainly greater, in Italy there is still too little attention on this topic (in facts some people seem to be still more focused on economic expenditure than on the environmental impact) and the presence of a historical/monumental building herit-age can be a further issue, because it requires specific authorization process (longer times) and rises the level of the restoration project (costs). Neglecting the monumental heritage which actions (on a national scale) can "green" the big cities, starting from the maintenance of the building facades? The paper introduces, first, the new national "facade bonus" that will be used to improve building facades, in a perspective of greater urban decorum, with a tax credit of 90% for the restoration and recovery expenses. Then, it analyses the current maintenance condi-tion of private properties and some green facade solutions. Assuming widespread inter-ventions in the form of extraordinary maintenance, it discusses - for a case study -environmental (water and CO2) and economic issues. At the end, it proposes some modifications to the recent national rules to facilitate interventions, awarding not just the simple redevelopment of the facades but, where possible, "green" actions on build-ings to achieve the Strategic Agenda objectives
Collecting built environment information using UAVs: Time and applicability in building inspection activities
Full text linkThe Italian way of thinking about maintenance is too often one-sided. Indeed, it is considered not so much as a useful practice to prevent the occurrence of a fault (ex ante), but as an intervention to solve it (ex post). Analyzing the legislation relating to the construction sector, it can be seen that it does not clearly define the responsibilities, timescales and methods in which maintenance interventions must be planned and carried out. For this reason, this practice is still very weak compared, for example, to the industrial sector, where it is an established practice. Currently, the complexity of reading the maintenance plans drawn up by designers and the considerable costs associated with maintenance operations discourage owners and managers from even carrying out preliminary inspection operations. This research aims to stimulate these stakeholders to carry out inspection operations regularly, highlighting their costs and benefits. In particular, working on a case study in Piedmont, the costs of visual inspections carried out in the traditional way are compared with those that would be incurred if unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were used. Finally, the collateral benefits of inspections carried out with UAVs are highlighted
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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