Category Archives: Uncategorized

Neighborhoods: Vallcarca i els Penitents, El Coll y La Salut

Group 2: Chryssa Karakana, Diego Lòpez, Mani Khosrovani, Javier González

BACKGROUND

Starting analyzing the density as a general issue, (building heights, typology of blocks, system of public spaces,…), in order to understand our area, I realized that the relationship (ratio) between built and unbuilt spaces wasn’t optimal.

Just taking a look of the area, in environmental terms, you might think that the ratio between built and unbuilt spaces is better than optimal, but just after zooming in you realize that most of this unbuilt spaces are also private spaces, because there are many low dense buildings, with private free spaces, spread all around the area.

But understanding the unbuilt spaces as public spaces, as available spaces for the population, the equation doesn’t work. The residential character of this specific area together with the centralized system of existing public spaces, are giving as a result not only a very poor ratio between the high amount of population living there and the available public spaces within the area, but also a very bad accessibility to this existing public spaces.

According to the World Health Organization, the optimal ratio of public space should be 9 m2 per inhabitant. So, taking into account this data, the neighborhoods of Vallcarca i els Penitents and El Coll are above this ratio, but the neighborhood of La Salut, with just 1,75 m2 of public space per inhabitant, even having the Güell Park inside, doesn’t cover this need of public space.

MAPPING

Considering the existing problematic in La Salut, the map attempts to show the real necessity of public space, the exactly amount of square meters for the existing population, expressed by blocks of the most dense area.

Overlapping the blocks (knowing how many people live in each one) with this kind of pixel system (where each pixel represents the 9 m2 needed per person) we can visualize better this problematic issue.

PROPOSAL

The goal of this analysis and the future proposal is to equilibrate the ratio between amount of people and amount of public space, specifically in this dense area.

Due to the absence of so much free space within the city, in order to achieve this challenge, it could be interesting to break with the traditional model of creating public spaces just on the street level (which means more land consumption), and try to colonize some residual spaces such as the roofs of buildings, or the interior of blocks, which nowadays are residual but in fact are very potential.

Through these operations we could start talking not only about the concept of semi-public spaces available for the residents of a block, but also about the energetic benefits of having green roofs and courtyards.

Barrios:  Vallcarca, el Col y la Salut.
Topic:      Money spent on green areas!
Team:      Diego López, Javier González, Mani Khosrovani and Chrisa-d Karakan

MAPPING!

Nature has been self sustainable since the early beginning of life. That’s why is so illogical the use of money on green areas.

According to axiology, money is a subjective value. This means that it’s not a goal itself but only a mean to a goal, and true positive goals are called objective values.  This subjective value, money, is by far the most important value nowadays on the world. That’s why it should be used to solve another unresolved values of the city, instead of being used on something that should be self sustainable.

PROPOSAL!

The main problems of the green areas are:

                -HUMAN CONTACT – This causes the frequently:

                                   cleaning of the grass areas (caused by the mistreat of pedestrians)

                                   the pruning of the trees (to avoid the invasion of pedestrian/cars areas and

                                   ornament)

                -IRRIGATION SYSTEMS – This causes the frequently:

                               maintenance of the systems

                               use of processed water (with the cost of the treatment because is drinking water)

                               use of tankers (to deliver the water) 

The proposals

-          to separate the vegetation from the pedestrian “layer”

-          to create a new irrigation system that uses rainwater

(pictures and more information coming next)

An effort is being made in this map study to draw the transmission of noise in the ” La Salut” neighbourhood of Barcelona, a higly touristic area with intense noise problem. Noise emission should be lessened according to the standards of a zero emission city. Therefore a noise map is the first necessary tool to be used. The linear sources  (crowded streets with pedestrians and cars) generate noise in the form of  waves which expand until they fade or until they  bounce onto a barrier  (buildings mostly). The source and the geometry of space is enough to define approximately the levels of  noise in each point of  the area. The levels are indicated by the different opacity of the same color.  We should have in mind that the  noise scale is not an analog one.To get a brief idea of  that let`s say that 80 dB sound twice as loud as 70 dB. The proposals, to deal with noise pollution, can be many since the problem is identified.

As transportation is a major source of co2 emission and as the given barrio is in between a very busy traffic thoroughfare in terms of traffic, so the real time co2 emissions by the vehicles are mapped to get an overall view of emissions in the nodes.

The co2 emission is represented by a contoured mesh showing the intensity of co2 emission in terms of gram per distance. The aim is to propose an interactive mesh which will work as a tool to measure the real time co2 emission which varies time to time. This mesh can work as an absorber of the shifting amount of co2 emission interacting with the number of vehicles as multiple agents acting as swarm. This mapping can be also used to optimize the traffic signal and rethinking the pedestrian crossing focusing the minimum adsorption of the polluted air.

presentation page pdf_ final

Barrio 3 Team Members : Ayber Gülfer, Manuel Huerta, Morten Bülow

This mapping  focused on  energy consumption in terms of the building typologies… Therefore it shows the buildings which consumes more energy and which areas should have been considered to produce energy or reduce consumption in order to keep the balance. The highest  energy consumers should be working  in a selfsufficient way. In order to do that one of the ways of energy producing , solar energy has been tried. So that  annual solar radiation on the facades of the buildings which is  in more consumers’ area, have been calculated in order to analyse which facades are more efficient.

Neighborhood: 20 Saint Gervasi – La Bonanova, Les Tres Torres, Saint Gervasi – Galvany

Group: Maria Margariti, Renata Stefanelli, Liliana Viveros Diaz

ANALYSIS OF THE AREA

In the three neighborhoods Saint Gervasi – La Bonanova, Les Tres Torres and Saint Gervasi – Galvany the research fields that stand out the most due to its visual impact are vegetation, transportation and residencies. Located on the foot of the Collserola park the area presents a great amount of gardens and parks such as Parc de Monterols, Jardí de Les Tres Torres and Turó Parc and individual green areas in between the buildings by Les Tres Torres and Bonanova area. The occupational uses of the buildings in the area diverge with the access of transportation to the places. Along the main roads and subway stations in the area between the streets of Avenida Diagonal, Via Augusta, Ronda del General Mitre and Balmes, the buildings have a mixed use of commercial stores on the ground floor and residencies on the floors above. Along the rest of the area, there are mainly residence buildings, with few local services located spread out. In the northern part, towards Collserola, the typology starts changing; some houses can be seen between dense green areas unlike the high concentration of buildings side by side with internal patios in the block in the rest of the area.

OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH

The purpose of mapping out the city in different aspects is to be able to transform Barcelona into a 0 emissions city. It is necessary first to find out what specific node pollutes and its effects. In order to have objective and accurate values only a section of the area was taken into consideration as a case study. Thirty blocks between the streets of Via Augusta, Ronda del General Mitre and Muntaner were chosen due to its intense flow of cars, buses, presence of railway stations, internal parks inside the typologies of the residences, public parks, and different heights and uses of the buildings around. Therefore this project consists of a research on the Co2 emissions of the pollutants of the area (traffic and buildings), the Co2 absorption by vegetation and its balance.

CO2 ABSORPTION BY VEGETATION

In order to compensate the CO² emissions of the case study region a research on the amount of absorption by vegetation was made. As a first step a map of the different typologies of vegetation was created, categorizing it in flowers, short vegetation, tall vegetation and trees along the streets. Through research, it is given that a tree absorbs 22,7kg CO² per year and has an average surface of 19,8m². Therefore, 1m² of vegetation with trees absorbs 1,15kg of CO2/year, but if the vegetation is short it is considered only 60% of that value. After all calculations were made, a map of the CO² absorption by vegetation was generated representing 250gr/m²/year of CO2.

CO2 EMISSIONS BY TRAFFIC

To analyze the traffic influence a research on the website www.bcn.cat/transit/en was made searching the hours with most traffic during the period of October 14^th to October 21, 2010. The traffic of the region was mapped during the hours of 10am-12pm, 2pm-4pm and 8pm-10pm. Finally the time that represented the biggest fluency of cars and motorcycles was from 2pm-4pm. Therefore, to have even further accurate and specific data the number of cars and motorcycles that passed by per minute were measured in every corner of the case study region during those hours. Given the information that each car emits 145,9 g/km/min of CO² gases, a calculation with the emissions per block per street was generated and a map of the CO² emissions by traffic was created representing in 0.4tons/m²/year of CO².

CO2 EMISSIONS BY DENSITY

The use of energy in buildings is another pollutant source analyzed in the case study through density. The three neighborhoods had a population of 145,532 people in 2009 distributed in an area of 2.009,4ha. That gives a total population density of 72 inhabitants/ha. Saint Gervasi – La Bonanova has an area of 223,50 ha with a population of 46,829 people, giving a density of 109 inhabitants/ha. Les Tres Torres occupies 78,80 ha with a population of 15,832 and density of 201 inhabitants/ha. Saint Gervasi – Galvany occupies 165,9ha with a population of 46,829 people with a density of 282 inhabitants/ha. The area of the case study that contains the 30 blocks is 266,690m². Given that in 1m² of a house 0,014 tons/m²/year of CO² is emitted, a research of the amount of floors of each building was done. By calculating the total occupational area and multiplying by the CO² emission coefficient (0,014 tons/m²/year) a map of the buildings emissions of CO² through density was developed, representing 12.5 kg/m² O/year of CO².

CONCLUSIONS

Considering the great amount of parks and trees in the region, the hypothesis was that the pollution and absorption would finally balance out. Calculating the potential of each block to absorb its own CO² emissions produced by traffic and density through vegetation we were able to find out that the vegetation in the area doesn’t make up for its pollution at all. More specifically, we concluded that in order for the vegetation to compensate the traffic pollution we would need to have 1600 times more the amount of vegetation existent and to cover the pollution from residences and commerce it would be necessary to plant 100 times more.

The main goal of this mapping study was to find out how much the traffic lights affect the city’s pollution and therefore the way to do this was to measure the Co2 emissions of cars on traffic lights. The mapping process was divided in three phases that resulted in a final Co2 emission map [based on diagramms and numbers]. It’s a mapping technique that can be applied throughout not even Barcelona but throughout all cities. It’s obvious that the cars emit much more while idling at a traffic light , so in such locations the map is full of “bubbles”. Yet, wherever the circulation is controlled basically with traffic signs the pollution is remarkably less.

More detail appears on the A1 presentation

The mapping analyze the existence situation in the area of Montjuic. The goal of this research is to show how the green areas affect the preferences of the visitors in the park of Montjuic. In the first map we can see the categories of the vegetation in Montjuic depended on the height, that was a usefull information because it helped us realize that the planted area with the view of the city, is the one who has more attractions. The second map is an effort to represent the movements of the visitors per day in order to understand  which are the more dense areas and to identify the specific “meeting” points. After the first recognition of the area, we came up with the result of the next two maps. Using the density of the people per square meter in each green area and the equation I= P*A*T(P=population, A=affluence,average consumption of each person in the population, T=technology,environmental damage inflicted by the technologies used to supply each unit of consumption) that gives us the bad impact on the environment per person, we create a map of the bad impact concerning the green areas. At last in the map with the zoom area, it is shown how the quality of the vegetation affects that impact(the definition of the vegetation’s quality is represented  in the legend by using vegetation’s categories). The final result_conclusion of the whole research could be the fact that the green areas are not always the “best” solution for the environmental problems, even if we want to think of them like that. We have to take into consideration all the parameters and the results of having green areas so that we can use the benefits of a good vegetation plan.

Team members: Andrena Papantoniou, Carolina Libardi, Erina Filipovska

In order to achieve environmental improvements and propose changes on the pollution issue of Barcelona, it was very important to understand the main generators of CO2 emissions and the roll of the urban vegetation. For this reason, we focused on the calculation of the overall CO2 emissions of transportation and buildings, and the CO2 consumption from vegetation. The outcomes of this research exposed the current giant pollution problem of Barcelona; the overall amount of CO2 emission are extreme (99.7%), whilst the relevant absorption is poor (0.30%).

Conclusions-Proposals: 1.Green areas are not enough to compensate CO2 emissions inside the urban area. Vegetation should be used as a strategy to improve insulation of buildings and to promote the psychological effect of a greener city. 2.Neighborhoods cannot be monofunctional. To avoid daily displacement of people going to work, neighborhoods should be, at the same time, a place of housing and work. 3.Design “Smart Buildings”. Buildings are responsible for a big part of the emissions CO2 inside urban areas. The emissions come from energy usage, such us electricity and natural gas. Buildings should be resource-efficient and well insulated.