Adaptation districts towards prioritized urban interventions in cities with limited green spaces.
Athens, during the four last decades, has been extremely urbanized while changing the environment dramatically. By reclassifying open spaces and networks of urban mobility, this model aims to indicate strategies for prioritized urban interventions based on their emergency toward climate adaptation. The preliminary application of the model will be applied to the metropolitan area of Athens, Greece because of the city’s limited urban green spaces and dysfunctional urban mobility infrastructure.
Regional
Greece
Metropolitan Area of Athens, Attica Region
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
As an individual in partnership with other persons
First name: Christos Last name: Grapas Gender: Male Age: 27 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Greece Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Piliou 10 Town: Athens Postal code: 14576 Country: Greece Direct Tel:+30 698 284 8625 E-mail:chrisgrapas@gmail.com
First name: Vasiliki Last name: Backomichali Gender: Female Age: 26 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Greece Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Tsamadou and Nirvana 2 Town: Athens Postal code: 16345 Country: Greece Direct Tel:+30 697 176 4942 E-mail:vassiabacomichali@hotmail.com
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New European Bauhaus or European Commission websites
Have you ever thought that fragmented plans for urban regeneration fail to deal with local communities' adaptation to climate change?
How cities could combine mobility infrastructure and open spaces to plan new patterns for emergent strategies on urban landscapes toward crisis management?
During the four last four decades, Athens has been extremely urbanized while changing the environment dramatically. By combining the high density of the built environment as well as random city patterns, the city suffers from both environmental and mobility issues. By reclassifying open spaces and networks of urban mobility, this model aims to suggest strategies for prioritized urban interventions based on their emergency toward climate adaptation. The hypothesis of this model is that using computational design to prioritize open spaces within the urban fabric according to their environmental performance, could lead to more effective urban patterns and strategies for dense and randomly expanded cities.
Urban Mobility
Open Spaces
Climate Adaptation
Adaptive Urban Landscapes
Prioritized Urban Interventions
The key objectives of this model are directly linked to sustainability and by trying to create a new taxonomy of public spaces based on their environmental emergency, we aim at data-informed, adaptive and democratic urban regeneration. The three main indicators of the research in terms of sustainablity are:
A)Urban heat island effect: By analyzing the urban heat island effect, designers can identify hotspots and prioritize strategies to reduce heat stress, such as planting more trees, adding green roofs, and designing shading structures.
B)Flood risk: By analyzing flood risk, designers can identify areas susceptible to flooding and implement strategies such as green infrastructure, rain gardens, and permeable pavements to reduce runoff and manage excess water.
C)Air pollution: By analyzing air pollution levels, designers can prioritize strategies to improve air quality, such as planting vegetation, adding green walls, and designing streetscapes that promote natural ventilation.
These analysis can also inform the design of open spaces to improve crisis management in the event of extreme weather events or natural disasters. For example, green infrastructure can help to mitigate the impact of flooding and provide evacuation routes, while trees and green spaces can provide cooling and shelter in the event of heatwaves.
By identifying clusters of environmental emergency within city, planners and municipalities have the chance to improve their urban strategies and their decission making processes. Using a data driven approach to design the public space not only indicates an accurate pattern and sequence of interventions, but also unviels hidden potentials from different sectors of the city. For example if in a neighborhood there is high value of urban heat island effect and limited amount of open spaces that will indicate through the model a shift to the local mobility infrastructure. Mobility infrastructure can be used to reduce the urban heat island effect in dense cities with limited green spaces in several ways such as Implementing cool pavements, such as permeable pavements, shaded bike lanes and walkways, green streetscapes as well as pedestrianization and plantation of certain streets.
An essential value of the proposed model is that it is based on open-datasets (Copernicus EMS Data, Google Earth Engine) and that it can be reproducable for every randomly expanded city with high density of the built environment. First of all, the model suggests a prioritized clustering of the city's capacity to tackle climate change thus, it doesn't require spesificaly large scale planning projects but in contrast, it allows incremental developments creating synergies to achieve one common target indicated by the model.
"Towards Urban Democratic Adaptation" is a model which is based on prioritizing urban interventions according to climate change and reducing the political involvement in the process of strategic planning. That means that the development of the city can be emerged in various areas and scales no matter the economic value of the land. This project suggests that land is more valuable as well as dynamic than what is commonly acknowledged by its “land use tag” and that b classifying the urban space based on environmental inficators can both enhance the environmental resilience as well as the well being of the residents of those areas .
Having an open-source model based on open datasets dealing with the climate emergency not only supports the design development of the selected areas but also highlights spaces that show high performance towards crisis management within the city. The scope of the project is not only to suggest new green spaces within the city but to use them as both social and emergency catalysts. Public spaces that function also as emergency infrastructure such as squares for evacuation are usually empty spaces within settlements used only in case of emergency. Although the literature on that specific topic covers the case of earthquakes, southern European Countries are dealing with major catastrophic phenomena related to wildfires, floods, coastal erosion, etc. This proposal aims to make the beginning towards climate-adaptive spaces that are part of everyday life such as streets and existing urban natural spaces by highlighting accurate locations for urban strategies. The model itself could be implemented in synergies among different kinds of stakeholders by having as a target, to highlight the importance of strategic parts of the city as clusters of either urban transformation or natural preservation. In the case of the metropolitan area of Athens, public spaces are limited and often ignored. What if climate emergency could be Athens' opportunity for the meta-design of public space and mobility network?
In order to set the conceptual framework of the model we run a bibliographic analysis of 30 scientific papers and publications related to the scope of the study, published between 2010 - 2020. he analysis above shows that the terms are organized in six main groups:
a.) The urban scaling which deals with human and urban networks as well as scaling and power laws.
b.) Network science which is related to urban innovation and complex system analysis
c.) The population of an urban area and its reflections on economies of scale and productivity.
d.) Urban innovation through classifications and the implementation of innovation districts.
e.) Open spaces within urban areas and how they are related to infrastructure and ecosystem services based on their local attributes.
f.) Issues addressing climate change and risk assessment of cities depending on their urban morphology.
Among the six main clusters visualized in the cloud chart above, this study will emphasize the last two, since they appear to be the most related to the selection of our case study area.
Why does the adaptation of open spaces in densely populated cities matter?
a)To mitigate the impacts of climate change by providing ecosystem services
b)Open spaces are directly connected with resilience and climate management and according to our analysis for the conceptual framework of the model the aso seem to be to be indirectly connected with urban innovation and
innovation strategies.
At this preliminary stage, the proposed model is based exclusively on open datasets. We estimate that after the stage of classification and before the stage of clustering the data in order to provide the optimal patterns and prioritization of urban interventions, the model will need additional information based on specific environmental aspects of the case study area. For example, if the value of urban heat island will be very high but there aren't green spaces available to enhance the adaptation of the area, priority will be given to urban mobility. By these means, the algorithm will indicate areas such as streets, roads, road islands, and old parking spaces that are critical for climate adaptation. In this way, mobility doesn't seem to be a desperate sector from open public spaces or private rooftops. All of the agents implemented in the indicated clusters will be aware of their neighborhood as one consistent project towards climate adaptation.
The main challenges that the project deals with are based in two main categories:
A)Evironmental Sector.
More specificaly the challenges in this category are:
1.Increased temperatures
2.Urban heat island
3.Heat waves
4.Long periods of droughts causing desertification
5.Air Quality Degradation
6.Vulnerability to extreme weather conditions.
B)Policy Making.
1.Data driven policies.
2.Crisis Management Processes in therms of urban planning and design.
3. Democratic decesion making with clear and open models directly linked to environmental threats and problematic city patterns.
