Crespi d’Adda - a Workers' Utopia
A case study research site
Energy Infrastructure and Transmission Grid
The Hydro Context
Crespi d'Adda is located along the side of the Adda River, which provides hydroelectricity to the village. Such a clean form of energy has been highly adopted within other regions aside from the River. This environment is suitable to achieve the goal of "Net Zero" for no carbon emission from the start of the energy origin.
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Hydro-based Energy System
Crespi d’Adda two sets of the hydropower plant. One is located right behind the textile factories of the village; The other is 1.5km away from the village, sitting on a twist of Adda in Taccani. This suggests that the capacity for electricity has already been considered for future urban expansion and technological evolution, which could be seen from its initial plan.
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Village ON/OFF Grid
The on/off-grid refers to whether a place is connected to the national grid, whose electricity comes from a major plant (usually thermal) with high power output. There to say that using on-grid energy always causes carbon emission.
Although Crespi d'Adda locates in within the distributing range of the national grid of Italy, it is indeed an off-grid village that relied on its own electricity production.
The national electricity of Italy was established in 1962 (Jannuzzi, 2006), and before that the energy production are privatized, relying either on hydro or thermal. When Crespi d'Adda was established, every settlement had to either rely on local natural resources or fossil fuel for electricity.
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A Net Zero Vision
Through reforming the suburban landscape of Crespi d'Adda by adding windmills, solar panels, and the repeating model villages powered by them, the intention of making suburban areas multiple decentralized Net Zero towns are expressed. Based on the independent energy supply, a village becomes a completed urban system that relies on its own specific industry and production.
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Energy Infrastructure Typologies
In order to relate invisible energy to the physical space, typologies of non-fossil-based power plants are investigated in terms of their output efficiency and the required area for construction.
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Energy Consumption - Factory Space
Textile manufacture is the major industry in Crespi d'Adda. According to the sub-departments allocated in the industrial zone, the whole planning follows the diagram of the industrial working flow. Through accessing the central street, fabrics are allowed to move from one department to another.
Comparison will be made between the traditional instruments of around 1900 and the up-to-date manufacturing devices in terms of their occupancy, input power, and labour consumption. This would guide the following renewal of the village model
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The Energy Equation
By keeping a complete profile of energy consumption for the living activities and the industrial activities that happened in Crespi d'Adda for textile manufacturing, the relationships between labour force, the area required for industry, and the productivity become clear through Mathematical modeling.
Limits of Expasion
By visualizing the models at max capacity proposed below, it is easy to see the exaggerations in Model-1900 of how it sprawls regardless of its neighborhoods. On the contrary, the area of Model-2021 can be controlled to fit the topographical boundary of the site, which suggests that future models could only consume lesser land for achieving the same productivity.
