Chiara Scanagatta

In the European context of the ecological transition, the construction sector urgently requires a shift from resource depletion to preservation. This study addresses the heterogeneity of the definition of natural, artificial, renewable, and non-renewable resources in the literature, establishing a coherent framework. Based on the analysis of these definitions, the study delineates the concept of Low-Resource Materials (LRMs) as a dynamic repertoire characterised by renewable, restorable, reused, and recycled components aimed at safeguarding material assets. Three core criteria and two indirect criteria for identifying Low-Resource Materials have been specified: these are designed to minimise virgin raw material consumption and reduce ecosystem pressure. The Low-Resource Materials conceptual framework supports designers in selecting materials and construction systems for the development of sustainable architectures with high material efficiency. Future research should refine this repertoire by evaluating various technical and regulatory thresholds, for the defined LRMs, and assess the acceptable limits of composite elements, to guarantee sustainable options at their end-of-life.

The installation of systems from renewables leads to the modification of communities’ proximity spaces, with irreversible alterations of the natural and man-made landscape. Hence the need to develop strategies to integrate these systems into the environment, preserving the value of places according to their peculiarities and characteristics. The PANORAMA project, with its multi-criteria tool integrating different aspects (potential, cost and environmental ones), promotes the activation of energy communities that benefit from solutions designed according to their specific features. The paper focuses on the aspect of environmental integration, illustrating the strategy adopted to analytically analyse and evaluate this factor, which is by nature hard to quantify.

The European social housing stock, built since the early post-war period, now needs major energy, structural and functional upgrading. The owners, almost always public bodies, are therefore called upon to adapt these buildings to the new regulations issued by the European Community. To reduce the costs of intervention, the preferred solution is that of a complete demolition and a subsequent reconstruction by using newly supplied materials, without considering the non-sustainability and social fallout of this choice. The contribution, starting from the hypothesis that more sustainable building rehabilitation interventions are possible, analyses which social and material supply aspects must be considered, and which design strategies can be applied to achieve the objective. First, the characteristics of social buildings in their historical evolution are summarized to understand their value in a broader non-economic sense. Subsequently, the requirements for a sustainable renovation of the existing social dwellings are analysed, and three, out of many other, design strategies are proposed. A case study is then presented and the application of the three strategies done through three Master thesis works is described. In conclusion, the results of the application of the strategies to the case study is analysed to assess whether it is possible to intervene on existing social housing complexes to achieve better results with a more sustainability-oriented perspective.

Nodding Syndrome (NS) is a degenerative neurological disease with poorly understood etiology which mainly affects children in some regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2019, a consortium of NGOs (the “Nodding Syndrome Allianceȁ), led by Amref Health Africa, has been working with the Ministry...