Resumen de Upgrade opportunities for buildings in city centers
Nelson da Silva Brito, Luís Mateus, Manuel Carlos Gameiro da Silva
The themes of climate change, energy scarcity and energy security motivated an overwhelming interest in new efficient buildings and, in a secondary level, in adapting these emerging goals into the existing stock.
City centers were, are and will (probably) be crossroads of people, information and goods, as well as references for those who live, trade or hearsay about them. In this perspective the economic, physical or quantitative approaches must be intertwined with irregular parameters as uses, local constraints, appropriateness or notions of beauty.
The ongoing case study evolves in the presumption that we can only �upgrade� what we �have and know� to a desired �want and expect�, and that the necessary tradeoffs result within these points. In this scenario added-value options like enhancing the ambient comfort levels in city centers can leverage the advantages of the amenities and transports abundance over the limitations of reduced living areas and parking restrictions.
To illustrate this perspective digital monitoring systems are used to identify the existing case study situation, a set of �flows� is used to visualize implications of a given service and to understand how to induce change on users� needs and corresponding expectations, and in a final moment, the same monitoring system will verify the results.
Having in mind that a �standardized comfort� response is impossible in the city centers as we know them, this paper proposes a contribution to substitute the anonymous �conservation-disguised� works that prevail in our city centers by custom-tailored technically supported interventions that reduce fossil fuels consumption while offering comfortable ambient conditions that re-attract people to the heart of the cities.
