HOPE
Responding to Heatwaves in the Older People Ecosystem
Meso
Main result
Project
Title
Seville measures to cope with heatwaves
Date 2022
Objectives
The objective is to make the city of Sevilla liveable for everybody during the
summers and preserving traditions as charlas al fresco
Location /geographical coverage
Seville, Spain
Organisation responsible for good practice
Seville City Council
Stakeholders and partners
The target group is residents, in particular children and older adults.
The partners are: Municipal Management of Urbanism, EMASESA, University of
Seville, Instituto Eduardo Torroja CSIC, PCT Cartuja, Fundación Innovarcilla.
Short summary
The CartujaQanat, is a 5 million euros project, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative, which contributes 80%.
The project is led by Seville City Council, with the participation of six partners:
Emasesa, Gerencia de Urbanismo, PCT Cartuja, Universidad de Sevilla, Instituto
Eduardo Torroja del CSIC and Fundación Innovarcilla.
The general goal is to improve universal accessibility and to reconfigure the existing urban planning.
Cartuja Qanat is an innovative urban transformation project. Made by a set of
actions that act as social dynamisers. The project built an amphitheatre, a souk and a tempered island. The amphitheatre is a space used during the EXPO'92 as a bandstand for shows.
The souk is a newly created rectangular space of 750 m2. It can be compartmentalised into sub-spaces according to multiple patterns to allow different activities to take place simultaneously.
The tempered island is designed as an open space with a certain linearity that
incorporates a series of vertical, horizontal and furniture elements that serve as a
link between the access to the square through the wall of Leonardo Da Vinci Street and the Amphitheatre. The aim is to create a tempered microclimate using innovative bioclimatic technologies developed and tested in this project.
The specific objectives of the project are:
• To recover life in Tomas Alva Edison Street by planning activities designed in
a participatory way driving urban transformation.
• To test a model of public-private collaboration as a social dynamiser of this
new space in the street with formulas for adaptation to climate change by
cities and citizens.
• To encourage the use of Tomas Alva Edison Avenue as an urban laboratory
and meeting point for citizens and other social groups by improving comfort
conditions and reducing the heat feeling in open spaces.
• To redesign and condition open spaces in a sustainable way by means of
innovative solutions and natural techniques that make it possible to achieve
comfort conditions that generate habitable, pleasant, and attractive spaces.
• To position the city of Seville as a territory specialised in climate change,
urban adaptation and bioclimate to recover life in the street, all integrated
in a new and innovative governance system.
Impact
Climate control of urban spaces
Most of the heat stress in urban space during summer comes from solar radiation.
The CartujaQanat is developing comfortable conditions in public space by
implementing the following strategies:
Control of solar radiation by shading elements that do not overheat.
Reducing temperatures of surfaces surrounding the occupants below body
temperature.
Reduction of air temperature (only when the other two strategies have been
implemented).
Environmental heat sinks
Just as there is a heat source par excellence in nature, which is solar radiation,
there are also environmental heat sinks in nature. On a large scale, the heat sinks
found in the urban environment are vegetation (parks) and bodies of water (rivers, lakes). At the scale of the Cartuja Qanat project, cooling technologies associated with more subtle but replicable environmental sinks are used:
The ground (conduction cooling).
The outside air during the day (direct evaporative cooling).
The outside air during the night (convection/evaporative cooling).
The sky at night (radiation cooling).
Green areas
Green areas, covered by plants, have different thermal properties than artificial
surfaces and building materials. The main differences are:
Solar radiation is mostly absorbed by the leaves, so that the reflected radiation is
very small (low albedo).
The evaporation of water from the leaves (evapotranspiration) prevents the leaves
and consequently the surrounding air from heating up.
Rainwater is absorbed into the soil. Subsequently, water evaporates from the soil
and mainly from the leaves.
From the first two properties it follows that plants provide an optimal solution as a solar control element as they can block a large part of the sun's radiation without producing reflections and preventing overheating above the air temperature.
The shade structure known as the EXPO pergola is rehabilitated in the avenue using species that adapt to the new conditions of salinity of the water from the
Guadalquivir River, which is used to provide nutrients.
Innovation
Qanat is the natural continuation of the climate control work that began on the
occasion of EXPO'92, expanding and updating the concepts and procedures carried out in the original work.
Without losing the working spirit of that time, the more than 30 years that have
passed since then have allowed the incorporation of ICTs in aspects such as remote sensing or artificial intelligence for the optimal management of the facilities using presence control, user preferences, climate prediction, etc.
Likewise, innovative components and strategies are incorporated such as variable solar control, night-time dissipation towards the sky, dissipation towards the ground with night-time evaporative regeneration, thermal storage in Qanats or the production of solar electricity.
All this contributed to the result of the project being a pioneering experience of zero energy consumption and zero emissions installation on an annual basis, proposing new business models combined with scientific knowledge for change, through eco-innovation and adaptation to new solutions for microclimatic improvement.
Lessons learned
• To lower temperature this project is a way to replicate the ancient Persian
technology of the qanats. These systems that were developed around 1,000
years ago built underground canals that carry water across areas that needed
to be cooled. Vertical shafts pierced along the canal take air underground to
the surface, lowering temperatures above ground. Now, technology
developed by engineers at Universidad de Sevilla allows this system to run on
renewable power.
• Use of the street as a social catalyst, improving it and involving the entire
ecosystem of the city (public and private agents and citizens) in this
transformation.
• Changing the appearance and functionality of the street concept and its future
evolution in the next years.
• Reconfiguring the existing urbanization with superficial interventions.
Sustainability
• Urbanistic governance – Public Private – citizen -partnership- Co-
responsibility of stakeholders- Implementation of 2030 agenda.
• continuity of Climate Control Policies that begun in Sevilla with EXPO 92
incorporating ICT, artificial intelligence.
Replicability and/or up-scaling
The intervention area of the project has been Avenida Thomas Alva Edison, in the Parque Tecnológico de la Cartuja. It is a project that was born with the intention of being replicated in other urban spaces, as a successful case of technological and sustainable intervention with a participatory vocation.
Contact details
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Related Web site(s)
Related resources that have been developed
https://www.pctcartuja.es/en/proyecto/cartuja-qanat#