Industry 4.0 and Bioregional Development. Opportunities for the Production of a Sustainable Built Environment

Abstract

The paper answers the question about how the technologies characteristic of industry 4.0 can support the bioregional development paradigm, focusing on local building production chains to support the energy retrofit of existing buildings. In particular it investigates design choices capable of activating supply chains that can intercept real and already existing spending flows and activate a workforce capable of evolving the anthropic system in the same direction characteristic of the natural systems. The paper focuses on the description of the features that industry 4.0 could assume in the field of building production to support energy requalification, reorienting urban metabolism of neighborhoods or small settlements towards local territories. It describes the characteristics of technologies adopted in the Industry 4.0 paradigm, in the context of open data, open-source software alongside low-cost microcomputers and sensors, and illustrates their potential in the possible activation of generative local microeconomies. Acceleration, digitization and automation of the construction sector are showing the relevance of having open real-time information to support decision-making processes. In particular the text focuses, on the one hand, on the applicability of such technologies and devices to areas characterized by very limited resources (such as for example the internal and more fragile areas in Italy); on the other hand, on how they enable community of prosumers and local cooperatives to complex productive activities characteristic of the energy communities.