Regenerating the urban outskirts: a self-sufficient ecovillage in Milan's Bovisasca area

The current climate emergency combined with the contingent energy crisis is pushing with increasing urgency in the direction of a progressive decarbonization of the built environment. This one can only be achieved through design choices aimed at a modelling resilient to climate change, that can mitigate its negative effects, as well as making a positive contribution to environmental quality through regenerative design. This means designing energy-efficient buildings while simultaneously containing land consumption. It also means decreasing the amount of energy required for the production, decommissioning and construction of building matter while reducing the exploitation of resources for food and water production. On the other hand, environmentally friendly and less impactful building implies a new way of living, bringing cities and housing back to a human scale, thus improving the quality of life. In this current landscape, energy autonomy from fossil fuels is increasingly pressing, and it is clear that this can only be achieved through an urban design aimed at decarbonizing cities. In the context of this decarbonization and urban regeneration, the concepts of energy community and self-sufficiency assume fundamental relevance. The thesis starts from the conceptual impulse given by the ReGen Village project, conceived in 2016 by entrepreneur James Ehrlich in order to be the model of an ecovillage of the future, modeled as self-sufficient, hyperconnected and founded on circular economy principles. Starting from the study of ecovillages of the second half of the twentieth century, we have integrated the requirement framework, distributional analysis and dimensional assessment that characterize the ReGen project to arrive at a design experiment of a self-sufficient village, both energy and food-wise, of limited size, located in a suburban Italian site. For this purpose, the project is made as a simulation of participation in the international competition Reinventing Cities, promoted by C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group in 2022 for the regeneration of the Bovisasca site on the outskirts of Milan. The project masterplan includes four housing modules of two different sizes, a community house, seen as an inclusive socialization space open to the entire neighborhood, and an area for the shared cultivation of vegetables. The thesis work focuses in particular on the design of one of the housing typologies, developed down to the scale of maximum detail, which aims to be characterized as a Net Zero Carbon Building thanks to the technological and plant engineering choices adopted. Starting from significant case studies, we defined the necessary spaces, the load-bearing structure, the stratigraphy of the envelope, and finally the plant engineering equipment, until we obtained two different types of housing units, modular and conceived with dry technology, on which an energy analysis was performed to verify their performance. In this way, the minimum village project, which was the objective of this study, was defined, according to criteria that can be re-proposed, through specific calibrations, in other locations, paying attention to the context of insertion and respectfully grasping the resources offered by the area.