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The REARQ research group is participating in “Revive the rooftops” (REV-TER), a project whose aim is to improve the quality of life of communities and people who live in cities in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, from the perspective of active, healthy ageing. REV-TER focuses on the Ciutat Vella district as the study area and proposes the transformation of its community rooftops into spaces for health, meeting and rest. These spaces are currently underused, but they are key as they are large outside community spaces in a very dense urban context.
The project is aimed at the improvement and reuse of these outside spaces through an analysis of existing rooftops in the district, in relation to the needs of the resident population and their socio-demographic characteristics and the needs for physical and architectural improvement of these spaces. In addition, solutions are sought with low-cost construction systems that are sustainable, removable and recyclable for the restoration of existing rooftops.
The project proposes different scales of analysis and work: a study of all of the rooftops of Ciutat Vella, a study of five sectors of interest in different neighbourhoods and contexts, and the analysis of around thirty unique study cases. The analytical process must enable a comparison of efficacy and assess the potential of implementing efficient improvement solutions that can be executed in a collaborative way that are affordable or low cost, through dry construction with reusable solutions.
As a result, in addition to characterising and assessing the rooftops space and the needs to which it could respond, a catalogue of improvement micro-projects will be drawn up, comprehensive solutions to improve habitability conditions on rooftops (safety in use, accessibility, healthiness, among others) and for the adaptation of meeting and community use spaces (comfort, shade, vegetation, storage). Some of these solutions will be constructed and prototyped as proposals to apply in pilot cases that could be replicated on other rooftops of the Ciutat Vella area and in other points of the city and Barcelona Metropolitan Area.
The project is led by the research group Architectural Rehabilitation and Restoration (REARQ) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) with the collaboration of the Interdisciplinary Group on Building Science and Technology (GICITED), also at the UPC, the Creativity, Innovation and Urban Transformation research group of the University of Barcelona (CRIT-UB) and the Oasiurbà Association. Funding was received from Barcelona City Council and the La Caixa Foundation, as part of the Barcelona Science Plan 2021. The budget awarded is €109,457.32, and the project runs from December 2021 to June 2023.
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