ParaSol - Multifunctional solar-active space and street roofing Leoben

A substantial part of our cities is utilized by areas of circulating and stationary traffic. Particularly outdoor car parks are environmentally rather unfriendly and occupy plenty of space. Not only do they seal the grounds and cause urban heat islands, they are almost always strictly monofunctional. Moreover, both, circulating and non-moving traffic cause noise and high infrastructure costs for maintenance and care. With the city of Leoben as a use case this exploratory project will, for the first time ever, examine the spatial effects, synergy- and energy potentials of newly developed wide-span light-weight solar canopies for streets and squares in urban public space as well as their implications on the townscape, the image of the city and the city function. Municipal parking lots as well as intra-urban transit routes and rail-tracks will be included in the exploration aiming at locating their potentials for decentralized electrical power supply. The exploratory project is tended to prepare a follow-up R&D demonstration project in Leoben as regards substance and strategy. This R&D demo will - with the inclusion of local material knowledge - demonstrate the prototype application of available as well as newly developed membrane, polymeric and thin glass material and photovoltaic technologies and/or combinations of technologies as part of the urban infrastructure and is meant to result in marketable product design and engineering. Based on an interdisciplinary basic evaluation on spatial, constructive, functional, legal and energy related requirements, constraints and implications the general framework and potentials of urban space, urban function, material construction and solar power will be analyzed. The applicability of already available solutions in constructive and material matters will be investigated as well as the need for new developments. Urban space and function as well as architectural design will be incorporated as an equivalently environmentally relevant factor from the scratch. The objective is to methodically elaborate both functional and urban spatial criteria as well as technical requirements as a footing for further decision making according the use case as well as representative generalized cases. The basic research will be followed by an integrative multiphase synthesis process using feedback loops to transform the matrix of disciplinary insights into transdisciplinary descriptions of potentials and developments. To attain this goal workshops with experts will be held to evaluate intermediate results and assumptions externally and expanding and clarifying the matrix of perception. Recommendations for action and on development, including a catalogue of criteria for the subsequent R&D demo-project complete the exploration. Planning process and approval procedure will be initialized as far as possible.