Too many rights: too many people without rights—two opposite case studies of claiming spaces and rights in Turin and Geneva

Introduction The multiple forms of living in the contemporary city clearly demonstrate how the relationship between living space and rights reveals itself in many ways, even to the point of being divergent and contradictory. Case description In order to analyze this point, we decided to observe two case studies that are emblematic for the divergence of issues that they are able to highlight. The neighbourhood of Les Grottes in Geneva can be described as a ‘manifesto of living’ based on sharing, solidarity, and freedom. On the other hand, the former Olympic Village in Turin expresses the “individual need to exist” of a population (of political refugees and migrants) not legitimatized to be in that place but one which, generally speaking, has nowhere to live. Discussion and evaluation These two situations are able to highlight how the right to housing today no longer has a universal meaning as in the struggles of the last century (70 s) but explodes in very different meanings. Conclusions For this reason the aim of this paper is try to rethink the concept of housing rights in order to emphasize how this term is still able to tell a lot about the urban and social transformations in contemporary cities.

Creating a positive mega-event legacy : exploring the impact of the Pan American games on the west Don Lands community, Toronto

In November 2009, the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO) announced that Toronto won the bid to host the 2015 Pan and Parapan American Games. The Toronto bid included many ambitious policies and challenging development projects. One of the most notable development projects is the construction of the Athletes' Village on the West Don Lands (WDL), a former industrial area that Waterfront Toronto has been working to revitalize. The construction of the Village is supposed to compliment the existing plan for the WDL revitalization, as outlined in the Precinct Plan, which aims to develop the site into a mixed-use community. The intent of this Masters Research Paper is to explore whether using the WDL as a temporary site for the Village will leave a positive post-game legacy, where the goals originally set for the site are actualized. Lessons learned from three previous Olympic village conversions will be used to develop four factors that indicate whether a successful post-game village conversion will occur on the West Don Lands.

Creating a positive mega-event legacy : exploring the impact of the Pan American games on the west Don Lands community, Toronto

In November 2009, the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO) announced that Toronto won the bid to host the 2015 Pan and Parapan American Games. The Toronto bid included many ambitious policies and challenging development projects. One of the most notable development projects is the construction of the Athletes' Village on the West Don Lands (WDL), a former industrial area that Waterfront Toronto has been working to revitalize. The construction of the Village is supposed to compliment the existing plan for the WDL revitalization, as outlined in the Precinct Plan, which aims to develop the site into a mixed-use community. The intent of this Masters Research Paper is to explore whether using the WDL as a temporary site for the Village will leave a positive post-game legacy, where the goals originally set for the site are actualized. Lessons learned from three previous Olympic village conversions will be used to develop four factors that indicate whether a successful post-game village conversion will occur on the West Don Lands.

Low-Energy Architecture for Sustainable Neighborhoods

Nowadays, energy consumption in buildings is one of the fundamental drivers to control greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact. In fact, the air quality of urban environments can cause two main phenomena in metropolitan areas: urban heat island and climate changes. The aim of this work is to showcase how different building variables can impact the residential building’s space heating and cooling energy consumption. Buildings energy-related variables can be fundamental viewpoints to improve the energy performance of neighborhoods, especially in future urban planning. This work examines four neighborhoods in the city of Turin (IT): Arquata, Crocetta, Sacchi, and Olympic Village characterized by different morphologies and building typologies. In each neighborhood, residential building was grouped according to orientations and construction periods. A sensitivity analysis was applied by analysing six building variables: infiltration rate, window-to-wall ratio, and windows, walls, roofs, and floor thermal transmittances. The energy consumption for space heating and cooling of residential buildings and local climate conditions were investigated using CitySim Pro tool and ENVI-met. The challenge of this work is to identify the building variables that most influence energy consumption and to understand how to promote high-energy efficiency neighborhoods: the goal is to identify the “ideal” urban form with low consumption and good comfort conditions in outdoor urban environments. The results of this work show a significant connection between the energy consumption and the six analyzed building variables; however, this relationship also depends on the shape and orientation of the neighborhood.

Afterword

On 17 December 2016, I had the good fortune to see a video installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Written, directed, and produced by Julian Rosefeldt, largely in and around Berlin, Manifesto staged thirteen scenarios—simultaneously looped on massive screens in the cavernous armory—in which extracts from nearly seventy avant-garde manifestos were performed by Cate Blanchett, featured in thirteen strikingly different roles. Her virtuosity redeployed even the most emphatic manifesto rhetoric into monologues that seem spontaneously uttered in a series of vivid locales, ranging from a cemetery to a fertilizer factory, a film studio, a drab apartment block, a former Olympic village, a puppet workshop, a recycling facility, and more. Blanchett, in effect, perpetuates the spirit of Fernando Pessoa, as if she were embodying heteronyms, not playing roles. ...

How to Use the Positive Impact of an International Sport Event to Promote Sustainable Adolescent Health

How fortunate to have been able to take part in the medical organisation of the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG) as head of the Olympic Village Medical Clinic and Medical Education Programme manager, while introducing some innovations to the Games! From a clinical point of view, the temporary creation of a high quality interdisciplinary medical clinic provided all participants aged 14 to 18 years old with global and equitable care. We adopted the WHO criteria to offer an adolescent friendly setting.

Satellite Monitoring of Thermal Performance in Smart Urban Designs

Climate change amplified by rapidly increasing urbanization is resulting in rising temperatures within urban environments. In recent years, to mitigate this the design and construction of new buildings has emphasized “smart” methods and materials for individual buildings rather than landscape-level planning and evaluation of new developments. Remote Sensing potentially offers a cost-effective means to monitor effectiveness of landscape-level urban design and guide developers to improve thermal regimes. This paper focuses on satellite monitoring of thermal variation in the area of London most affected by construction in 2010–2015. Split-window Land Surface Temperature (LST) models were applied to ASTER and Landsat 8 satellite imagery, requiring separate investigation of thermal trends due to temporal inconsistency. Getis-Ord-Gi* cluster analysis of the ASTER image identified three main thermal hot spots: Eastern, Stratford railway/underground station, and Stratford High Street. It is assumed that increased thermal stress within these areas is mainly from anthropogenic heat. However, local thermal variations for Eastern Olympic Village are attributed to changing meteorological conditions, facade materials, canyon morphology and orientation, or insufficient shading and ventilation. Future development of a new cultural hub at this location will significantly affect distribution of green spaces and influence their cooling ability.