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| Vema, city of the future (project's detail) | Commitment to innovation with a sustainable development perspective and the results of the PICADA project led, in Venice, to the joint meeting of Italcementi and Vema, the city of the future, star project of the Italian Pavilion. During the meeting data and analyses were presented on the effectiveness and functionality of photocatalysts, their recent applications in urban areas and their potential for use in cities.
TX Active® photocatalysts are most effective when used in large-scale constructions, where larger surface areas are exposed to polluting substances and light and thus return better results in terms of reduction of harmful agents such as those generated by works on street paving or wall coverings in urban areas subject to high volumes of traffic.
Franco Purini, architect, professor of Architectural Composition and City Planning at the Sapienza University in Rome and curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 10th International Architecture Show of Venice commented: “Vema is a new virtual city situated between Verona and Mantova. It is an ideal and innovative city, confronted with problems such as homes, workplaces, infrastructure and green areas. Vema attempts to realise sustainability as a total experiment that pervades every design aspect of the city. It also seeks to contrast with the diffused city, replacing the indistinct and uncontrolled proliferation of houses, warehouses and shopping areas with finite and recognizable urban entities that favor new territorial relations while making visible those already present with unexpressed potential in Northern Italy today.”
Vema is a concrete example of substantial technical and aesthetic progress towards the cities of the future. The experimental results of the models developed by Italcementi’s researchers show a decrease rate of 47% in urban pollutants in the hypothetical building of an innovative city such as Vema using TX Active® based photocatalytic cements in place of standard cement formulations.
The effectiveness of the depolluting properties of TX Active® cements has been tested in other examples of practical applications by Italcementi’s researchers.
For instance, in Bergamo, a street has been paved with blocks manufactured using cement containing TX Active®. On the basis of a mathematical model and using the data obtained from such blocks, it was demonstrated that, on a 500-metre long road with two lanes and an average 400 cars passing every hour, the reduction in pollution was the same as the effect of removing 150 of those same cars. In the Milan province, in Segrate, a TX Active® photocatalytic mortar was used to coat the asphalted surface of a stretch of Via Morandi, which carries approximately 1,000 vehicles per hour every day; here monitoring has revealed a reduction in nitrous oxide of around 60%.
Many other projects have used photoactive materials in Italian cities including Brescia, Forlí, Florence and Rome. Among the most important architectural constructions to employ TX Active® products are the Dives in Misericordia church in Rome and, in France, the new Air France terminal in Charles de Gaulle airport, the Cité de la Musique et des Beaux-Arts in Chambéry and the Hôtel de Police in Bordeaux.
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