Proyecto Haz[Otea]

Abstract

For some time now, it has become increasingly common hearing about the great potential trans-forming urban rooftop spaces poses for increasing cities’ sustainability, in a speech usually encour-aging their adaptation into green roofs or use for locating renewable energy generators. However, it is currently extremely difficult assessing to what extent these statements are correct: • Available information and assessments of these rooftops’ types describe technical issues and/or focus on specific aspects of their impact on reality [thermal insulation, rain water re-tention ...] being hardly relatable to the impact a general transformation of an urban area’s rooftops would imply for the area’s overall state. • The impact of some technological solution/design may be different in different urban are-as. • Rooftops may host several uses, yet we have found no document providing an extensive comparison of the impact of each of them. To assist in this debate, in this text we estimate the expected impact of the hypothetical transfor-mation of all available rooftops in an existing urban area: Palos de Moguer neighborhood in Madrid. In order to do so, we use Meta[S] model proposed by the author as PhD Thesis project, which as-sesses 64 dimensions of urban reality. The assessment allows us to highlight three key issues: • Not all possible rooftops transformations produce the same benefit for cities/urban areas, and in urban consolidated environments rooftop transformations that allow people’s use may pose higher collective benefit. • Rooftops transformations benefit maximization requires individual analysis of each urban area, relating its particular needs with available rooftop surface characteristics. • The number of different rooftops possible uses and their ease of implementation can be greatly increased if some previsions are incorporated in Urban Planning/Building Codes These last two issues allow us to state the interest of both updating national Building & Design Codes and that municipalities regulate the conditions and use of rooftop spaces. In the Conclusions we list some issues we believe should be incorporated by different rooftops’ regulations.