- An Infra-Free approach to improve the energy and resource management for illegal buildings settlements    431 kb by    Caroniti, Vincenzo & Anilir, Serkan | vincenzo.caroniti@unina.it    Short Outline Infrastructure nets are a cause of energy and resource consumption. This research evaluates sustainable practices based on appropriate technological choices to treat waste as a resource to improve peri-urban areas characterized by illegal buildings. Abstract In South Italy the necessity to enhance peri-urban areas characterized by legalized households built without a proper permission or with no permission at all, clashes with the inappropriate technological solutions by lying a rigid infrastructure net, important cause of energy, raw materials, and environmental resources consumption, upon a spread urban context. The rural area of Giffoni Sei Casali, a small village in Campania, represents a typical example where the evolution of a peri-urban environment was facilitated by the illegal building phenomenon, this one encouraged by the building amnesty policies. An Agricultural Park for this peri-urban area has been proposed in order to establish a new equilibrium between settlements and agricultural production areas and based on an innovative and sustainable energy and sources management. In this vision the “Infra-Free” research, conducted by Prof. Serkan Anilir of the University of Tokyo, gives an interesting approach. Integrating contributions from different disciplinary fields such as biology and aerospace technology, the IF research comes to the awareness that nowadays technological innovation allows to be independent of infrastructure networks prefiguring scenarios for the future architecture development. Based on an IF approach the research has developed a pilot project for a portion (about 30 households and 100 inhabitants) of the peri-urban area of Giffoni Sei Casali in which critical situations, such those as lack or inadequacy of sewage and gas nets, are considered as opportunities to experiment more sustainable and innovative practices based on appropriate technological choices. Low-tech solutions such as compact biodigestors, treating wastewater and organic and agricultural waste and producing biogas for households themselves and high quality fertilizer for agricultural activities, and artificial wetlands, treating gray-water and clarified water from the biodigestors, are proposed as basic elements to start an enhancing conversion circuit in which waste productions of each area can implement contiguous areas. Keywords infrastructure, illegal buildings, energy management, source management, waste management, technology Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2009: Low Carbon Cities   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper