Green Roof in refurbished industrial building (Office building 22@)

This office building is in the Zona 22@ of Barcelona. The 22@ Barcelona urban project transforms the old industrial areas of Poblenou (Two hundred hectares) in a high-quality environment for working, living and learning. 

The area required the development of an urban planning which required the building to meet the requirements of private and public services with innovative criteria, for activities developed indoors and the building’s image within the city.

The project contemplates the revitalization of a pre-existing industrial building, from which the structure and some equipment are recycled. It tries to propose answers without the need to start from scratch.

Scale of the project: object (building, etc.)

Scales impacts from this NbS action should be assessed: object (building, etc.), neighbourhood

Urban density in which the NbS is implemented: medium

Rehabilitation of an existing building by adding, among other rehabilitation measures, a semi-public green space on the roof with a positive influence on the health of users, positive effects on urban climate against the heat island effect and positive effect on water by it storages in the deck space. It also improves the energy efficiency of the building by the insulation provided by the layers of green cover.

Refurbishment financed by the owners community

Global (estimated) cost of the project: 1M€- 5M€

Cluster: public private

Financial Model: Private Finance Initiative (PFI)

• improve the health of users,
• reduce heat island effect,
• increase water storage,
• improve the energy efficiency of the building.

The joint tries to answers the necessarily regeneration and recycle of buildings and obsolete neighborhoods without the necessity of destroying. Only the structure of the existing building is preserved.

The roof is projected like a green semi-public space, advisability space. There exists a big hall for multiple uses for conventions, parades and different meetings; a new “level 0” for the coexistence.

The NbS is combined with bioclimatic design. The facade is a new skin, double enclosure skin based on bioclimatic riteria for heat contribution and indoors ventilation. The new technological skin expresses the colours, textures and the use of transparencies, therefore the activities involved inside.

Process enablers:

Economy drivers → Conditions for new business models and finance schemes

Process inhibitors:

Economy barriers → Budget constraints

Looking for solutions with low economic impact on lower interest elements, to balance the high costs of interventions with environmental and social value.

BUSINESS MODEL

Business cluster: Organizational

Business model: Re-purpose the business for society/environment

Rehabilitation of industrial buildings for rental offices with innovation and sustainable criteria and financed by the owners community.

Temporal perspective

Expected time for the NbS to become fully effective after its implementation: short (immediately to few months)

Feedback: Still well adapetd

Expected life time of the intervention: around 25 years

Dates (for project delivered): 2004

Main enablers factors:

The process benefit from the existing knowledge (from all the  stakeholders) regarding NbS in cities and it was possible to generate the missing knowledge.

Main inhibitor factors and how they were solved:

The process suffer from the concerns of some of the stakeholders regarding the unknown consequences.

SEATEX: (Community owners) majority owners

MAIN PARTNER:

• Tècnics G3 : - project manager and quantity surveying
• Pich Architects : Architects and landscape architects

Pich Architects offered the solution and the majority-owner (SEATEX) accepted it. As investors, SEATEX controlled the total cost and were the ones who made the final decision about how the refurbishment should be done.

GOVERNANCE:

Governance cluster: private private partnerships

Governance model: Non State Market driven governance

Governance cluster: Network governance

Governance model: Adaptative governance

In 2000 the Barcelona City Council approved a new urban planning ordinance aimed at transforming the old industrial area of Poblenou, with obsolete factories that had long ago been abandoned or were simply not very productive, into a magnet for new activities. This named 22@ urban planning allows more construction, more public spaces or green areas and subsidized housing as long as the previous industrial activity is replaced by offices or other business services and equipment related to new technology and knowledge. The goal of 22@ is to encourage land owners to update obsolete urban planning elements from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries while maintaining economic activity, which would not have happened with a traditional rezoning from industrial to residential designation.

The financial model is a private private partnerships defined as a Non State Market driven governance. It used a network  and adaptative governance.

Zuzana Prochazkova, Responsible architect, R + D + i department, Pich Architects

Marta Regoyos, Acciona Ingeneria

Nature4Cities (https://www.nature4cities.eu/) aims to develop a knowledge diffusion around Nature-Based Solution (NbS) and a decision support platform through new collaborative models.

This GREEN ROOF project is part of the Nature4Cities's pioneer case studies database, it will feed the observatory, NbS pre-selection and replication tools, gathered into the Geocluster4NBS.

This GREEN ROOF project was chosen as a pioneer case study for the following reasons: 1) Original criteria -> Business model (all financed by the private owners). 2) Implementation -> Rehabilitation of old industrial buildings into rental offices, adding innovative and sustainable measures.

Nature4Cities project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 730468.