Landscape aesthetic contamination, from weak point to Urban redemption element: case Eleusis, Greece

In the case study it is examined, the contamination concerns the historically poorly planned relationship between the city's historic center, the archeological site and the industrial area currently being decommissioned. The urban resilience project is elaborated in the context of the candidacy of the city (and the subsequent assignment) to European Capital of Culture 2021. The main objectives are the realization of a new “ecology of functions”, the urban regeneration of the historical center through the rehabilitation of existing monuments, the rational organization of the archeological site with the replacement of the current museum (in situ) with a new one (in a neighboring abandoned area), the redesign of the relevant natural landscape, the recovery and reuse of some industrial buildings as critical evidence of “industrial archeology”, the “smart” connection between the archeological site, the restored industrial buildings and the city itself, in the context of a new daily life, transforming an economy based exclusively on the secondary, now in irreversible crisis, into a cultural “industry”. It is therefore a matter of solving the main contradiction between two important memories that build today's reality (ancient: archeological site; contemporary: abandoned industrial areas), combining them with the redesigned urban center, for the creation of a new landscape characterized by a valuable “contamination” between old and new

HARMONIA: strategy of an integrated resilience assessment platform (IRAP) with available tools and geospatial services

The huge amount of the available data nowadays has raised some major challenges which are related to the storage, fusion, structure, streaming and processing of these data. In this paper, we present the development of a holistic framework, entitled HARMONIA, that encompasses State-of-The-Art solutions for the emerging issues related to Climate Change, natural and/or man-made hazards and urban/peri-urban risks. The Horizon 2020 HARMONIA project is developing an Integrated Resilience Assessment Platform (IRAP) which plans to provide targeted services for different groups of end-users. In particular, it will actively support urban decision-makers in strategic decisions and planning and citizens in facing daily effects and risks of Climate Change. Additionally, the platform will be a place to interconnect cities which end up facing similar Climate Change effects. HARMONIA IRAP leverages cuttingedge technologies (i.e., explainable Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, multi-criteria analysis, dynamic programming) and services (ie., Virtual Machines, Containers) in order to provide solutions considering the complexity and diversity of extreme earth and non-earth data. In addition, this platform includes a Decision Support System providing early-warning feedback and recommendations to the end-users. In this way the HARMONIA IRAP design tends to address these challenges by offering the corresponding dynamic, scalable and robust mechanisms with the aim to provide useful integrated tools for the related users. Datacubes architecture, which is a major part of the IRAP, offers the opportunity to investigate more sophisticated correlations among the data and provide a more tangible representation of the extracted information

Energy poverty in Portugal, Italy, and Norway: awareness, short-term driving forces, and barriers in the built environment

Portugal, Italy, and Norway differ by energy performance of buildings and gross domestic product (GDP). Portugal has significantly highest thermal discomfort with harsher winters. In 2021, 80% of Portuguese buildings had a low energy rating, with 75% of buildings without thermal insulation, highly contributing to the energy poverty (EP) of the country. In Italy, despite a generally mild climate, the building stock has low thermal performance. The most affected areas are the suburban and peri-urban ones, with an EP rate in southern regions between 13% and 20% compared to 8.8% at national level. Moreover, 65% of buildings were constructed before the first law on energy saving criteria and a 25% of it has never undergone any work of maintenance or improvement. Norway, despite the limited studies performs well respect to other European Economic Area and European Union countries, in investing and using indicators to enhance and monitor the green energies’ use. Because of energy price growth, seasonal price fluctuations, and different energy tariffs, energy inequality is increasing. EP risk is underestimated, masked by Norway's high GDP and regional price disparity. Energy inequality is increasing due to energy price growth, seasonal price fluctuations, and energy prices’ geographical inequality. The barriers in reducing EP are the underestimation of risk masked by the high GDP, and the need of homogenized prices in Norway. This study provides an overview to discuss EP awareness and it assesses the drivers and barriers that influence building's energy efficiency renovatio

Analysis of visitors’ mobility patterns through random walk in the Louvre Museum

This paper proposes a random walk model to analyze visitors' mobility patterns in a large museum. Visitors' available time makes their visiting styles different, resulting in dissimilarity in the order and number of visited places and in path sequence length. We analyze all this by comparing a simulation model and observed data, which provide us the strength of the visitors' mobility patterns. The obtained results indicate that shorter stay-type visitors exhibit stronger patterns than those with the longer stay-type, confirming that the former are more selective than the latter in terms of their visitation type.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

The Anthropocene monument:on relating geological and human time

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? In this paper I first look at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. I examine the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. I explore the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. I suggest that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilise our way of thinking about deep time

Sustainable Strategies for Urban and Landscape Regeneration Related to Agri-Cultural Heritage in the Urban-Periphery of South Milan

Urban Sprawl, and the fragmentation of the territory associated with it, are factors degrading the peri-urban areas in many European cities. The aim of this research is to investigate the role that Green Infrastructure (GI) and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) can have in redefining peri-urban areas, relating urban and rural landscapes. The case study focuses on the Southern Milan periphery, at the rural-urban transition fringe; the transformation pressures, tendencies, and local activities are approached, and the main problems are juxtaposed to the potentialities, defining simultaneously the site’s vulnerability and latent resilience. The elaboration of a research-by-design approach focuses on the refurbishment and interconnection of disused open spaces and abandoned buildings: converting them in favor of a GI and NBS network, through a perspective of Ecosystem Services (ES) enhancement, but also encompassing cultural heritage and multicultural aspects. The overall design demonstrates the possibility of deploying an infiltration strategy, of the rural landscape into the urban fringe. The objective is to articulate a multiscalar methodology and give insights on how a GI network can rebalance urban-rural transitioning spaces and enhance ES, improving the quality of marginal spaces both in environmental and socio-cultural terms. View Full-Tex