Renovation, densification, and intensification in the built environment

The paper illustrates the main strategies, methods, and solutions that are possible for the actions of renovation in the existing built heritage, in view of the necessary to upgrade of such heritage to achieve the highly energy efficient and decarbonized targets set by the recent action plans and directives at EU level. However, the built heritage encompasses an extremely large variety of different building’s types and ranges from historical and protected buildings up to the modern stand-alone buildings in the peripheries of the cities. Thus, starting from considerations on the challenging issues related to the energy efficiency in historical buildings, the paper moves up to illustrate new buildings’ design and different cases of deep transformation for the buildings built after the second world war, particularly from the ‘60s and ’80s. With reference to that more recently built heritage, it is the authors’ considered opinion that the nonenergy-related benefits might play a key role in the deep energy renovation. Actions that focus on the creation of a substantial increase of the architectural and urban quality, along with the growth of real estate value of the existing buildings through significant energy and architectural transformations, can be considered strategically effective. They can be indeed necessary to develop harmonized, concerted, and innovative actions to unlock public and private funds, fill the energy efficiency investment gap, and ultimately contribute to re-launch the construction market. The paper illustrates some of the results from two EU funded projects Abracadabra and Pro-GETonE, both dealing with new renovation strategies based on the possibility of densifying, intensifying the consolidated urban environment. Regulative obstacles must be overcome for the implementation of such a punctual densification policy, that has been proven capable of fostering the investments in deep renovation of the existing built environment while contrasting the urban sprawl and soil sealing.