Heating communities

The main goal of the project is to reduce the environmental impact of a low density neighbourhood through the improvement of two public buildings in order to generate and example and to provide different energetic strategies for the inhabitant and their homes. In order to achieve these goals, nets are knitted between university and reality.

The main goal of the project is to reduce the environmental impact of a low density neighbourhood through the improvement of two public buildings. When intervening and improving the public sphere, we are allowed to initialize an empowerment process by the community which will subsequently end on the improvement of the individual sphere: their own home. In order to evidentiate the right place to develop, the different collective spaces from the neighbourhood are analysed through a series of parameters such as the property, proximity or real usage. The chosen place where the intervention will take place must be of public ownership, since it is the public administration who should lead this change. The proximity to the users is of capital importance, since it will reflect directly on the ownership of the project by the community. When crossing all these parameters two civic centres stand out: Centre Cívic l’Elèctric and Casal el Rectoret. Establishing a bond with the staff from the centres and the users is of capital importance in order to work hand by hand and developing a thorough analysis which will embrace from static data - concerning the technical details from the building - to dynamic data - concerning the binomial user/usage -. Through all this data a dynamic simulation model is generated and from there we are able to know the climatic and energetic behaviour of each building. From there we can calculate the necessary reduction on the consumption with a view towards the implementation of different changes, such as optimisation of the usage or changes on the skin and active climatic systems. These changes are separated into different packages thought through the lens of the future European policies - such as 20/20/20, 40/27/27 and 2050 - with regard to the minimal economical inversion needed in relation with the maximal energetic saving. This relation is validate through the calculation of the global cost; the construction and maintaining costs of the following 30 years compared to the consumption corresponding to each package