For many years, the innovation surrounding smart cities has been concerned with what was happening on the street, but it left out a fundamental part: housing. This place which is at the same time a refuge, a place to rest and meet, also a place of work for some people, and which in many cases, for example, is not prepared to withstand the high temperatures reached in summer.
All the investments that for a long time have been aimed at finding imaginative solutions to improve urban mobility or waste management, are now being poured into the search for more energy efficient, more comfortable and faster-to-build homes with traditional systems.
Having reached this point, it is not that the Smart City Expo, in its twelfth edition – the largest of all that it has held so far – has become the old Construmat. Not even close. In the Gran Via area of the Fira de Barcelona this week there is not a trace of reinforced concrete and yes, instead, a lot of wood like the one exhibited by Sorigué.
The business group from Lleida is an example of the evolution of the local sector and is building a building with 42 homes in laminated wood on Carrer Pallars in Barcelona. "In a certain way, the process of the automotive sector is copied, a more industrialized way of doing things that can be transferred directly to the work", says Xavier Llopis, Sorigué's director of urban spaces.
The best demonstration of the fact that it is an upward trend is the presence of divisions of large companies, such as Siemens and Samsung C
In Europe they plan to start with the Nordic countries for a purely practical reason for the sector. "The works in the winter have to stop for a few weeks due to the bad weather; with the industrialized method, you can prepare the module in the cold months in the plant and do the exterior work in the summer", points out MinKang Jung, from the team specializing in modular constructions at Samsung C
Industrialized construction also presents an important advantage at a time when the availability of affordable housing is an urgent need: construction time is considerably reduced.
A simple construction that could perfectly take 18 months can now be realized in a year, and the bulk of the work is in the factory, because the installation on the site can be realized in less than two months by installing prefabricated modules.
The result is also much better than that of shipping containers, which were pioneers at the time but have a much more limited useful life.
As is often the case with potentially trendsetting innovations in the smart city sector, there is a concerted strategy between the public and private sectors.
It has been clearly seen in recent years in public transport systems. An example in the case of housing is the block of wooden floors on Carrer Pallars, built by Sorigué and commissioned by Barcelona City Council, which will use it as public housing for social rent. There are also other cases in which it is the administration that leads and involves the private sector, as well as research centers and, even, architecture studies that have forged alliances with all the necessary links. This is the strategy usually followed by the Bit Hàbitat foundation, which is about to start testing in the facilities of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) a solution to equip blocks of old flats in the Besòs-Maresme neighborhood with balconies through industrialized modules that would be attached to the facades. It is a model that has worked successfully in social housing in France and is now being adapted to Barcelona.
The three solutions that have been chosen have been the result of a process in the form of a challenge in which the different parties involved have been making contributions of needs and solutions until finding proposals with the possibility of being viable and replicable in other places.
According to Michael Donaldson, Commissioner of Urban Innovation of the City Council, it is an example of how "through this strategy the living conditions, efficiency and energy savings are improved and, therefore, the quality of life of many people who would otherwise find it very difficult to access the rehabilitation of homes and buildings".
If it works, in a couple of years it will be possible to replicate it in other places in the Catalan capital and in the Barcelona metropolitan area.
