SPATIAL DESIGN FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION. Exploring Tools and Approaches in Consolidated Urban Contexts

Top-down EU energy policies have led to unintended consequences, with significant impacts on the ground. Much of the responsibility lies in their socio-spatial blindness that views space merely as a support, architecture just as something to equip with technology, and people solely as economic users. The strategies of this “eco-modernization” are applied with difficulty in the Southern European cities due to specific socio-spatial conditions that inhabit dense, historic, and car-oriented urban patterns affected more and more by changing climate effects. What is lacking, yet crucially needed, is understanding and developing place-based design solutions that cross the scales from the architecture to the landscape, deepening the attention to existing configuration and living community and going beyond a just technofix approach. Here the ongoing research PEDFORALL is trying to interpret a specific urban context -the neighbourhood of Ostiense in Rome- by emerging and remerging innovative approaches revolving around, for example, the concept of energy sufficiency, embedded energy, bioclimatic urbanism, and “caring the existence” to reduce the energy consumption instead to use it better. The goal of this contribution is to share the initial findings of both desk and field studies and to discuss the potentialities, limitations, and innovations of design strategies for energy sociospatial innovation in the complexity of existing urban patterns and living communities.