What’s ProdActive Landscapes for?
The ecological emergency and the global energy crisis are driving us to rethink architectural design in terms of optimization of local resources, reduction of water and energy requirements, and integration of technologies producing energy from renewable sources. Sustainability issues have already been transforming building’s function from places to live to multifunctional systems integrating energy production and, always more frequently, food production, including roof top or hydroponic indoor agriculture. The ProdActive Landscapes project proposes to use the same complex approach in landscape design, as intermediate and essential step between complex Actives buildings and the complexity of the city. In order to evolve the public space design from the contemplative and leisure, passives, functions into an urban space of food and energy production.
ProdActive Landscapes is a parametric model of territorial productive potential assessment, that far from suggest a deterministic way to design, wants to be an instrument of conscious design in order to create a network of re-signified green urban areas working as one diffuse system of energy production as alternative to the actual model of renewable energy extensive systems.
ProdActive Landscapes is proposed for the service of local community and landscapes designer, who wants to integrate renewable energy production in that existing high density neighborhood where power demand is non reachable just by ordinary rooftop PV systems technologies. The model purpose an integrated system of traditional agriculture, waste water treatment with herbal purification, water collection, biomass production, and bio-PV energy production, looking for the way to optimize the land surface in order to respect sustainability issues .
Pick the ground
Land Analysis Process
The Analysis process starts from Geographic Information System providing by internet access most of data required as land morphology, weather data, soil quality, productive potential by using several on lines database.
ProdActive Landscapes is a dynamic model. It means that allows several ways of use consistent with different ways to design. For example, it is possible to evaluate the maximum productivity starting from land analysis, obtaining the maximum human charge supported in a self-sufficient environment, or to start from a local community of residents in order to study its specific requirements, in term of land’s surface, to collect water, purify water with herbal purification, produce vegetable, milk eggs etcetera.
A solar analysis provides a first discrimination of land. In order to evaluate productive potential, the model gives as output a “potential food production map” and the number of persons “feed-able” for each crops category ( cereals, olives, vegetables) as the same way as for milk/eggs or meat productions; defining the maximum community supported by that territory depending on nutritional model too, vegan, vegetarian, or general.
Seed the sky
The landscape’s productivity evaluation is just the first stage of ProdActive Landscapes project. The second stage basically consist in design an module for agricultural production parametrized for rooftop agricultural production as well as urban gardening automatically adaptable at specific environmental condition , specially solar radiation, to optimize energy production by solar pv or bioPV . This gardening module easily download-able an Fab-able in every Fab Lab will integrated sensor to collect environmental and production data feedback of all the network of new Energy-gardeners around the world.
