Urban Redevelopment Concept (URC) for Existing Neighbourhoods

International Journal of Strategic Property Management, 2011

This research paper examines the potential of urban refurbishment projects to accommodate ambitious low-energy solutions. This can be made possible by aligning the interests of the community (energy conservation) and owner (increased value) through redeveloping the land owned by present residents being used as equity to finance the low-energy upgrades to existing dwellings. This holistic view of urban redevelopment is presented as a financial analysis model. In the paper a real-life case of the Siltamäki suburb in Helsinki, Finland, is presented and analysed. The approach used to interpret the case is the Public-Private-People Partnership (4P). It was found that the developed model allows several different scenarios to be presented for decision-making without compromising any of the stakeholder's financial interests and, that owner-occupiers can, as a result, have new energy efficient refurbishment options. The originality of this paper lies in the way the owner-occupiers’ viewp...

It is not unusual to witness buildings that are relatively young being demolished to make way for new developments. Redevelopment is one of the alternate solutions to adapting buildings and sites to new demands and economic uses. Redevelopment implies the total replacement of existing buildings whereas rehabilitation involves maintenance, repair and adaptation in order to ensure a sound structure and some functional adjustment of the building. Redevelopment therefore offers wider possible advantages in modifying land use, site coverage and density as well as introducing new building techniques and standards of construction, specification, design and layout. Urban redevelopment involves comprehensive redevelopment of numerous buildings and activities extending to large parts of an urban area. Population growth and urban decay has led to city redevelopment projects which are undertaken through different strategies. This study would discuss alternate ways through which urban redevelopm...

Architectoni.ca, 2012

Most European suburbs are characterized by large residential housing estates mainly built during the second half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, these estates present serious social and economic issues as well as environmental related problems. These areas are often characterized by a low quality of life of their inhabitants, repetitiveness of buildings, degraded green and public spaces. Many Countries have had to face and are still facing these issues and are dealing with them in different ways through some activities to set the buildings back to their original status or by improving the quality of the housing and the standard of living. This paper presents some considerations about the regeneration of these areas, proposing methods, procedures and technologies previously defined for an Italian case study, aiming at the renovation and revitalization of these areas and, consequently, of the entire city, based on an adaptation of the uses to the new needs and to the environmental conditions. Broadly speaking, the objective is to propose a methodology of approaches to the interventions plan scaled to the district level, aiming at a sustainable urban development, as foreseen by the European goal of "Smart Specialisation Strategy"-in view of Horizon 2020 (next EU framework program for research and innovation 2014-2020).

The urban book series, 2023

Multifamily post-war middle-class housing in Italy represents a significant heritage which strongly characterizes urban landscapes. Although this huge stock has long been addressed by national policies as a major potential to pursue European climate targets, only the recent massive incentive measures (Superbonus 110%) have started to produce results for the energy upgrading of the buildings, offering alternatives and motivations (through the size of the public funding and the institution of the credit transfer) to the issues of the typical ownership fragmentation. However, these first partial outcomes are controversial from a life cycle, a social and an economic point of view. In addition, policies focus only on the energy performance of the single building, conceiving the interventions through a narrow-minded and generic attitude. The typological obsolescence and the multifaceted relationships between the building and the neighborhood are neglected, although important social, economic and energy efficiency benefits might emerge when addressing the renovation through a multi-scalar, multifunctional, and place-based approach. Stemming from the collection and analysis of ongoing initiatives and projects, possible models are outlined, enlarging the scenario of the transformations to include the urban scale. For example, underused private spaces can host new public or semi-public functions to contribute on the one hand to the management costs of the condominium and on the other hand to trigger local neighborhood regenerations. Moreover, widening the transformation perspective can envisage a group of buildings and the adjacent public spaces as a system to create energy districts where energy infrastructures introduce new amenities and added value.

Smart and Sustainable Cities and Buildings, 2020

The energy efficiency challenge in buildings mainly concerns the energy efficient refurbishment and investments in existing buildings. Yet, today, only 1,2% of existing buildings is renovated every year in Europe. The actual investment gap in the deep renovation sector is due to the fact that high investments are required up-front, and they are generally characterized by an excessively high degree of risk, long payback times, and the general "invisibility of the energy benefit". ABRACA-DABRA is an H2020 project that aims to activate a market for the deep renovation of existing buildings through a major transformation of the buildings aiming at the increase of the real estate value. This increase is essentially given by a volumetric addition (Add-ons) whose added value, once capitalized in terms of selling or renting, is able to reduce the payback time of the investment. Several pilot case studies have been used to test the efficacy of the strategy. At this stage of the project, a challenging sector like the social housing sector is also being explored to verify if a retrofit strategy including add-ons and densification could help boost the renovation of the public and residential housing stock. The process is based on a costeffectiveness analysis. In this paper, to demonstrate how the densification action could be an effective solution to promote energy efficiency interventions and new business models to shorten the payback time of renovation investments, five The original version of this chapter was revised: This chapter was inadvertently published with an incorrect version of Chapter 9. The book has been repaginated due to these changes. The correction to this chapter is available at

2009

INTRODUCTION This paper analyses design strategy and tools for planning and designing urban transformation areas, from the point of view of practitioners. In our rol e as concept developers, who are directly participa ing in urban transformation, social housing & real estate project development, are closely involved in projec ts with many investing participants. In these projects we e xperience the need to of find new ways to join forc es and to enjoy working together. We also notice that the economic value of urban design is no longer mainly appreciated from traditional short and long term fi nancial perspectives. There is thus a question for a different approach to the development of economic v alue. This asks for design strategies that can guid e this development of the economic value on the long term. In this paper we exemplify how we interpretate this economic change and introduce a practical case in which we used a design strategy that met these chan ges. We will describe stra...

Planning Theory & Practice, 2012

My interest in the financing of public infrastructure and facilities in urban development led me to do research at the Delft University of Technology (2004–2008) and the Radboud University of Nijmegen, where I obtained my PhD degree on this topic in 2010.

Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture, 2015

The paper is based on the results of two research experiences: an European research titled "Improving the Quality of Suburban Building Stock" (COST Action TU0701) and an Italian National Research project called "Renovation, Regeneration and Valorization of Social Housing Settlements Built in the Suburban Areas in the Second Half of Last Century" (PRIN 2010-2012). The paper summarizes the researches outputs whose main aim was to illustrate the potentialities of different strategies for the improvement of suburbs. In order to implement different strategies for the refurbishment of suburban areas, researches were aimed firstly at the identification of several case studies that are representatives of the European panorama because of their typology, construction and state of physical and social deterioration. The final result was a collection of examples for the urban regeneration, gathered from case studies but offering a wide-scale of applications on public housing complexes. The paper highlights different approaches and strategies taken by different countries towards the methodologies of assessing, refurbishing and adding new value to the suburban areas, in view of increasing not only the quality of buildings but also the quality of public spaces and services, for a better quality of life of the citizens.

Advanced Materials Research, 2014

This paper discuss the thematic of public-private economic negotiation in the realization of urban regeneration programs. The Complex Urban Programs (PUC) represent a generation of planning instruments generally in variation to ordinary instruments of general planning (PRG). These instruments found its legitimacy on new forms of concerted planning, in which the objectives are the effectiveness and efficiency of the public administration and the most important point of view are the quality and transparency of the negotiation between public and private. In these circumstances for the purposes of the feasibility, the arguments of urban planning must necessarily be supported by economic-financial considerations resulting from appraisals of the benefits financial and the new real estate values generated by the decision to promote the program in PRG variant. Particular attention must be paid on the modality for consultation between the public government, the owners and the developers when...