O PROGRAU/FAUrb participa da coordenação de dois projetos CAPES/PrInt – UFPel:
CENTER FOR HEALTHY CITIES, AGING AND CITIZENSHIP
Coordinator: Prof. Adriana Araújo Portella
Aging must be understood as a construction crossed by a plurality of rationale, practices and cultural values that shape the ages of life. Recent studies conducted by the World Health Organization show that from now until 2050 the number of people over 65 will double, which poses a number of challenges, especially for countries like Brazil. The idea of healthy aging points to some fundamental data such as the insertion of elderly individuals in a friendly city, the development of intergenerational practices that allow for the use of accumulated experiences and the transmission of memories, the development of strategies of inclusion and elimination of obstacles of this individual within the social context that surrounds him/her.
The elderly individual is situated between three spatial dimensions, which correspond to different levels of interaction and memory: the domain space of the public power – the city, the shared space – the neighborhood, the private space – the dwelling. These three dimensions, in which daily experiences are included, must be adapted so that the aging process takes place in a healthy way, granting autonomy to the elderly, strengthening social ties through integration in dense networks such as the neighborhood. These are life paths that evoke memorable narratives, key for the affirmation of social identity.
This Center will involve teams from the Graduate Programs in Social Memory and Cultural Heritage and a Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism, together with the Laboratoire de Sociologie Mémoire et Cognition (LASMIC) of the Université Nice Anthipolis, France, and the international partnership project “Designing Places with the Elderly: Towards Age-Friendly Communities”, funded by the Newton and ESRC Funds, coordinated in the United Kingdom by Heriot University-Watt in Edinburgh, and the Universidade Federal de Pelotas in Brazil, as well as researchers participating in the development of the application “APP+Saude”, developed in partnership with the National University of La Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB).
The Center aims to analyze the interaction of these three dimensions – the city, the environment, and the dwelling – with the perspective of including the matter of aging in the policies of urbanism, seeking to generate solutions that may be part of public agendas.
Para mais informações sobre o projeto, clique aqui.
GROWING FOOD ON SITE-BUILT SUBSTRATES
Coordinator: Prof. Eduardo Grala da Cunha
From the perspective of Architecture, the process of greening urban spaces is one among many possible strategies to be adopted aiming sustainable practices. Greening the city means applying vegetative treatment to built surfaces through the use of plants adapted to local bioclimatic conditions. Vegetation is an extremely important element in the regulation and balance of extreme climatic conditions and influences comfort and energy consumption when it assumes control of direct solar radiation, humidity and air movement. The possibility of growing food can be added to this climate control role.
The growing of vegetables, condiments and medicinal herbs has been gaining the urban spaces of Brazilian cities. The trend, which also has supporters in international metropolises, is sometimes a consequence of the little time available for leisure. The cultivation of spices at home and/or in the urban environment becomes one of the few ways of contact with nature elements, characterized as Productive Landscaping.
Thus, the greening of cities can result in natural spaces within the urban centers, promoting comfort in two scales: the urban and built ones. On the other hand, the addition of vegetation for food consumption to built surfaces implies a multidisciplinary effort, as it responds technically to the choices made for suitable growing substrates, species adapted to different climates and, consequently, and for a constructive physics that can support food production.
This project seeks to increase international partnerships around this theme (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the company Intemper in Spain, and the University of Lund, Sweden) by creating database on the present state of knowledge within the international arena and by producing growing guides for the built environment that meets different climatic regions, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of the investigated solutions. Also, the works should bring information in regards to the energy performance of buildings and the climate of the urban space based on these vegetated surfaces.
In the field of engineering there are important initiatives carried out by UFPel in collaboration with groups based in England, France, Sweden, Spain, Spain, the United States, Canada and Poland, such as the catalytic degradation of pollutants and the conversion of biomass to energy, which are aimed at strengthening.
