DESIGNING MATERIAL AND ENERGY FLOWS FOR A URBAN ECOSYSTEM M.L. Palumbo 1 ; A. Scognamiglio 2 1: IN/ARCH, via Crescenzio 16, 00193 Roma, Italy, +39 335 8438281 2: ENEA, UTTP Portici, piazzale E. Fermi 1, 80055 Portici (NA), Italy, +390817723304 mail to: malupa@libero.it ABSTRACT Every civilization is largely defined by its ability to control energy flows and reserves. In this sense, it is hard to doubt that our civilization is only a transitional phase. Looking to the future the issue is: what will be the shape of the new solar society? We know that two different models are now possible, one still based on a centralized and delocalized production, an other one based on a local, diffused and highly networked production. If both models are possible, not only the diffused nature of the solar resource, but mainly the deep social challenge of giving people the ownership of the tools of energy production, makes the diffused model the real ecological challenge of a new civilization. And this challenge, has indeed a lot to do with architecture. Because it means to imagine our built environment, our private houses and offices as well as our public and common spaces, as the new, visible and tangible, spaces of energy production. It means stopping to think architecture as a static, armless space to start thinking it as a “productive” entity, according to the needs of its inhabitants but also to the global needs of the planets. Moving form these theoretical bases, the paper discuss the results of a post-graduate master, “Designers of Sustainable Architectures” promoted by InArch (Italian National Institute of Architecture), presenting a new design method based on what we called the “productive footprint”, defined as the amount of different surfaces (mainly for energy and food production and water recycle) needed to sustain, through on site renewable resources, life in each specific context. The paper also argue the possibility to use the same “productive footprint” as a measure of the productive capacity of a project. Based on the relation between consumption and regeneration capacity, the footprint could be negative, balanced or positive, giving designer and citizens an easy and communicative tool to understand the metabolic impact of a built environment. INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A NEW CIVILIZATION Every civilization is largely defined by its ability to control energy flows and reserves. Human history itself can be seen as an ongoing discovery of the possible manifestations and mechanisms of energy conversion: starting about ten thousand years ago with the first agricultural techniques that would determine and enhance the earth's productive capacity to answer to our vital energy needs – food - up until the discovery of how to release energy from the nucleus of the atom in the late 1930s, to the recent understanding of photosynthesis. From the food we eat to the heat that warms us to the light that illuminates our world to the means of transport by which we move, the forms of energy that we use determine the shape of the society we live, in terms of both time and space. In this sense, it is hard to doubt that our civilization is only a transitional phase because, unlike preceding civilizations, it cannot last for thousands of years because even if they were used in the most efficient possible way, Proceedings CISBAT 2011, Lausanne, Switzerland 671