The city: building, microclimatic and pollution.

Every city has its historic and architectural peculiarities, but it is not only a matter of style. These peculiarities make whole regions unique and tell about the past, power relationships, and the way how societies have evolved. But palaces, buildings and city clusters, modern and less recent, do not only tell a lot about the stylistic and historical importance of urban centres, but they are also a signal of the state of health of the cities. Their shape, structure, the materials that compose the buildings and their distribution on the territory depend on two factors: the rising of temperatures and pollution of city clusters.

The cities, islands of heat.

There’s an invisible line that separates the city centre from the suburbs, the cities from the country, the inhabited places from the isolated ones. It is mainly felt in summer. To change in a clear way is not only the landscape, but also the temperature changes: the cities are warmer than the countryside, even if to separate them there are only a few kilometres. Urban agglomerations, in fact, compared to the surrounding less populated areas, are characterised by a particulate microclimate. The phenomenon that experts define as a heat island and that causes a rise in temperatures of about 5 or 6 degrees in the cities compared to the countryside. The shape of the buildings, their distribution and density are between the causes. But we must also count the widespread cement, asphalt surfaces that prevail over green areas. On top of that, there are pollutant emissions from vehicles, pollution from heating and air conditioning systems used in homes.

How to avoid the sixth mass extinction.

The UN declared in 2019, that man could be the cause of the sixth mass extinction. These predictions become real in the first episode of the web series. The cities, already saturated, are inhospitable environments for the man of the future. For this reason, the main characters of the story are forced to go back to the countryside where the pollution still allows the survival even if in critical conditions.

The apocalyptic story emphasizes the consequences of what might happen and provides a warning. The responsibility of change is in the man’s hands, thanks to his capability of reasoning, thanks to a process of consciousness achievable through studying and information. It is the task that society, in other words, entrusts to the future generations of architects and engineers. Inhabiting in the city will mean respecting the balances of the environment, using the knowledge on the study of air flows, to build cities that are on a human scale and of the nature that hosts him.