Presentations

The recovery funds must be used to reverse urban equality and rebalance the city. Spanish cities have nearly a thousand vulnerable neighbourhoods, which accumulate a lack of amenities, poor quality housing (with its correlative energy poverty) and lack of home-grown opportunities. They are a window of opportunity to invest funds that seek to make Europe fairer and more sustainable.

Opengela is a project which looks to spread urban regeneration in the Basque Country using a novel new instrument: the creation of neighbourhood offices which will act as one-stop-shops to provide advice and support to the neighbourhood community. The office in each neighbourhood (Opengela) centralises all the procedures and administration related to the process of integrated renovation of the apartment buildings: from administrative paperwork to dealing with energy services contractors or the provision of financial aid. This project, financed by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission, has started with a pilot test in two neighbourhoods: Otxarkoaga (Bilbao) and Txonta (Eibar).

Vulnerable neighbourhoods are a European-wide problems that have been under the spotlight in the EU’s Cohesion Policy since the 1980s. The first programmes for the urban renewal of those locations date back to that time. The presentation will provide an overview of how this matter has been addressed by the Cohesion Policy in recent decades, with the focus on lessons learnt and the present moment.

Even though the dominant narrative tends to present what is now known as the public space as an inherently positive sphere and, in fact, the outcome of progressive policies, it can but show the reality of social relations in those cities in which it is developed where it rewards inequality, exclusion and social conflict.

An experience based on management in Territorial Planning, Urban Development and Urban Regeneration in the Basque Government.

The rural ecosystem has always been based on cooperation driven by need. The farmstead has been set up as a system of maximum efficiency at every level. In recent decades, the technological boom and the cultural change driving consumption and the individualisation of life have fostered an isolation that generates greater vulnerability, neglect, scarcity, inefficiency and growing tensions. The cooperative mindset aims to recover the spirt, work and experience of the rural community adapted to our time, which is applied with solutions in different areas and activities. Our species is essentially social and needs to live in mutually-supportive groups to develop its learning and potential to contribute. The aim is to achieve greater balance and sustainability with the environment, and provide healthier and more fulfilling relations for all people and entities.

The city and the country – traditionally complementary – have now turned away from each other in an unsustainable process of territorial confrontation, fragmentation and inequality. Architecture and the territorial fields of knowledge are therefore facing the challenge of providing solutions that allow those fragmented territories to be reconnected (“stitched”) and reconciled; the green infrastructure can be a tool and great ally in that task.

The aim is to narrow the digital gap in population units. That is particularly relevant in rural areas, which operators often ignore and that lead to a greater imbalance in the connectivity between the inhabitants of less populated municipalities (or isolated areas) compared to towns with larger populations.

The inequality of existing in infrastructures and services between the rural territory and the urban is an indisputable reality. As regards energy, the challenge of the transition to renewable sources has generated a new type of inequality: large-scale developments (wind and solar power) in the countryside impose a new reality that change the landscape, the relations with the land, the economy and the environment. This paper will provide a Rural Energy Community case study set up in a village of less than 100 inhabitants in those areas of Spain affected by the population drain. The role of the energy communities as a factor of change with huge potential in the transition to renewable energies will be discussed.

We aim to be an energy self-sufficient and sustainable school. Working together to eradicate energy poverty by setting up an energy community of solidarity. The photovoltaic facility will generate power for the school, as an example of energy efficiency, and the surplus will help to lower the electricity bill of 27 families by 50% as a lesson in solidarity.

Las Encartaciones Supramunicipal Region was studied in the Urban Regeneration subject taught in the fifth year of the Degree in Architecture Studies – as part of the Urban Project Management Certification – at the School of Architecture at the University of Navarra. As part of the Spanish Urban Agenda, the study place has been analysed and assessed based on the descriptive data of each of the municipalities making up the supramunicipal district, along with the integral urban regeneration proposals for Las Encartaciones. Those proposals were developed taking into account the ten strategic goals set out in the Spanish Urban Agenda. The paper comprises a presentation of the whole analysis and assessment procedure. It also goes over the regeneration actions that have taken place during the running of the subject and the workshop during the BIA Congress.