The unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our social and economic life is bringing into a new light the way we are managing the environment where we spend our daily life. How can we redesign our communities to be more resilient in front of such shocks? How can we mitigate the even more dramatic and long-lasting impact of the climate and resource crisis? Which are the lessons we can learn from the past?
Federico Butera, professor emeritus at Politecnico di Milano, will discuss “The future of settlements”. Cities host 55% of the world population today and will host nearly 70% in 2050. Because of their present linear metabolism, they already account for 75% of natural resource consumption and 60-80% of greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, settlements are the key for the transition towards sustainable development, and to comply with it their metabolism must become circular. How? The possible answers to this question will be explored.
In the second part of the webinar Prof. Salvatore Carlucci, Head of the Sustainability and Built Environment Division at CyI, will introduce emerging solutions for energy efficiency in settlements, which are under development at the Institute. Dr. Mia Trentin, Post Doc Fellow at the Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center will conclude the session by presenting the central role of the house in the cosmopolitan community of Larnaca in the 18th century.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Federico M. Butera
Federico M. Butera is Professor Emeritus at Politecnico di Milano. For more than 40 years he has been active in the fields of solar energy applications, low and zero energy architecture and sustainable urban development, focusing both on developed and developing countries climates and contexts. Since the 1970s he has been involved in many research tasks of the International Energy Agency dealing with energy efficiency and solar energy applications in buildings, and since the 1980s in several EU research programs and in UN projects dealing with sustainable buildings and communities.
Since 1990 pioneered the introduction of the energy issue in architectural design as part of architecture students’ curriculum. The research outcomes were transferred into the design of low energy buildings in Italy and China – both in university campuses – and of zero energy buildings in Hungary, Italy and Niger. He was also involved in the concept design of a 100,000 inhabitants new town in China and in the development of the energy plans of the cities of Rome and Palermo.
More recently, as a consultant of the UN agency Habitat (UN-Habitat) he was involved in the education issue in the field of sustainable buildings and communities design in tropical climates. As a result, he was the principal author of two handbooks: one dealing with buildings and the other with neighbourhoods, both in tropical climates, and also organised several training courses in East Africa, plus an online course, all derived from the handbooks. This experience was adapted to China, with a third handbook dealing with zero carbon villages in the Yangtze River Delta.
He is the author of more than 200 scientific publications and 12 books. He was awarded: “Pioneer for contributions in renewable energy” by the World Renewable Energy Network in 1998; by Eurosolar in 2004 for his “outstanding service to the utilization and promotion of Renewable Energies and Sustainable Architecture”, by PLEA in 2015 as Pioneer in Passive and Low Energy Architecture.
Additional Speakers
Prof. Salvatore Carlucci
Salvatore Carlucci is the leader of the Sustainable Built Environment Group of the Energy, Environment, and Water Research Center (EEWRC) of The Cyprus Institute. He has expertise in building physics and building performance simulation and optimization, and his research interests range from the multi-scale and computer-aided design of adaptive and responsive building components, smart buildings and zero-emission neighbourhoods, to the analysis and evaluation of the indoor environmental quality, energy use, and occupant behaviour in buildings. He received a PhD in Building Systems Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in Italy.
Since 2014, he worked as a qualification fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, and, in 2016, he obtained a tenured full professorship in Building Performance Simulation. In 2019, he was appointed Leader of the Forskerlinjen, a pilot study program for highly motivated and research-oriented students at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of NTNU.
Since October 2019, Dr. Carlucci is a Tenured Full Professor at the Cyprus Institute. Currently, he is one of the subtask leaders of the IEA-EBC Annex 79 on “Occupant-centric building design and operation”. Dr. Carlucci has published more than 50 scientific papers and contributed to seven books on occupant-centric building design and operation, indoor environmental quality (thermal, visual and acoustic comfort, and indoor air quality), sustainable, smart and low-energy buildings, building performance simulation and optimization, and building physics.
Dr Mia Gaia Trentin
Mia Gaia Trentin is an MSC-2nd opportunity RIF Post-Doctoral fellow at The Cyprus Institute-STARC. She received an interdisciplinary education, including Archaeology (BA), Cultural Heritage Studies (MA) and Social History (PhD) which reflects her interests and her research approach. In September 2017 she joined STARC of The Cyprus Institute as a post-doc fellow in collaboration with NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Application) - the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign enriching her knowledge in Digital Humanities.
Her research interest focuses on Medieval and Modern written culture in all their aspects, from traditional historical study and sources’ editing to epigraphy. She is specialized in informal written communication – graffiti – focusing on writing to recover past people’s practices, attitudes and approaches with their surrounding natural and anthropic space.
She is also contributing to the development of a specific methodology for graffiti studies. At the same time, she applies and adapts digital tools for documenting and visualizing graffiti in its material and immaterial aspects. Her current Post-Doc research focuses on Medieval and Modern graffiti along the sea routes Venice-Jerusalem in the Eastern Mediterranean. GRAFMEDIA (Graffiti Mediterranean Dialogue) project aims to recover the voices of past people showing that informal writing and communication can go beyond geographical, social, cultural and religious borders expressing the inner need of people to communicate and to relate with the surrounding space, in the past as well as today.
About the Event
The Italian Research Day in the World – established by the Ministry of Education, University and Research in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health – traditionally falls on 15th April, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year the Embassy of Italy has decided to postpone its promotion to June.
The event also comes under the umbrella of “Enrico Fermi Lectures”, a series of talks co-organised by The Cyprus Institute and the Embassy of Italy in Nicosia with the aim of bringing to Cyprus leading Italian scientists to speak about cutting-edge scientific developments, thus contributing to the scientific and technological cooperation between Italy and Cyprus - a testimony to the long historical and cultural ties between the two countries.
More broadly, the topic of the webinar is connected to the COP26 climate talks planned to be hosted in Glasgow in 2021 and organised by the UK in partnership with Italy and have been delayed by a year because of the Coronavirus crisis. The need for climate action cannot be slowed down and it is important that any COVID-19 recovery plans and responses are linked to the climate change ambition. As the responsibility for such “green recovery” falls on each one of us, raising awareness is fundamental.
