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Housing plays a key role in the world path to energy transition, and retrofitting buildings is a major asset to this end. Unfortunately, despite the supporting measures and incentives promoted in many countries, the renovation rate is still too slow. This is even more complex within some specific assets, such as social housing, which, especially in Italy, depends on the availability of public funds. The study proposes a predictive tool conceived as an enabler in the decision-making process, capable of considering and comparing the performance levels that different retrofitting actions can reach, according to building features, intervention costs, timing, and resource availability. The tool is tested on a social housing case study in Bologna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing is the main environmental impact generator (62 %) of the whole building sector, but it also has the greatest reduction potential. Enhancing its performance is thus crucial to sustainable development. Social Housing (SH) represents a critical asset within the residential segment, due to the recurrent investment shortage and several environmental, social, and economic related implications. In Italy, SH is held by around one hundred public agencies facing endemic resource constraints for both maintenance and retrofitting, which are limited further by a diffused lack of information regarding the conditions and features of the buildings they manage. In cooperation with an Italian SH agency (ACER Bologna), we developed a speedy tool to compare the technical and economic effects of different refurbishment scenarios on a case-by-case basis. This is not a tool to manage retrofitting works, as the many already available, but a means to help large housing managers overcome the intention-action gap that limit their capacity to properly prioritize interventions based on reliable information. The research focuses on the validation of the fast procedure for estimating the baseline energy scenario, arguing that the relatively small inaccuracies are irrelevant for the scope of the tool and are compensated for by the time saved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable part of recent EU policies is currently addressed at developing effective measures to support the transition towards a low carbon society according to the principles and goals of Roadmap to 2050. In this general framework the links between the development of low-emission strategies and climate-resilient approaches to buildings play a key role. As most part of the existing building stock was built before the 1980s, retrofit and renovation actions are widely investigated. Despite progress in this field, relatively little attention has been given to the connections between the achievable energy savings and the energy investment needed to pursue the renovation process and to how technological choices can impact on the energy balance according to a multi-criteria perspective. The paper will explore how different technologies and design solutions to building envelopes cladding contribute to the reduction of the heat gains in urban environments and how appropriate adaptive strategies can further mitigate against accelerated greenhouse emissions. It will discuss the relationship between individual building performance and consequent effect on external environment. The effects of technological and material choices are evaluated for some design scenarios and conditions in order to develop an indicative impact mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific literature offers a wide range of studies evidencing the progress done in the retrofit actions dealing with the current building stock; however, renovations of hospitals are still an open field of research due to their typical complexity that is usually associated with a very challenging updating processes to maintain or increase operational level. The paper provides a synthesis of a study developed by a team of the Department of Architecture for Saint Orsola Hospital in Bologna with the scope to explore innovative retrofitting strategies. The brief provided by the management unit of the hospital was connected to the general renovation plan involving the entire site and particularly some existing buildings taking into account some limitations concerning budget availabilities and everyday activities needed to ensure acceptable service level for the end users. The design approach starts from defining a basic unit (a typical hospital room) that is deeply analyzed to report the starting conditions (indoor environmental parameters) and then used to simulate the potential impacts of retrofitting actions on its performances. The results allowed to parametrically develop a step by step strategy scaled on each building sector and on the building as a whole to evaluate the global impact on energy performances while considering time and costs of each retrofitting options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]