Sustainability, industrialisation and digitalisation: the resistance to change and the opportunities for innovation in the real estate sector, discussed in a conversation with Maurizio Melis, science communicator and radio host.
Many of you will already recognise his voice from the airwaves of Radio24. Others may have seen him on the stages of conferences and events dedicated to technology, the environment and innovation.
But not only that: a science communicator (and an eclectic one!), he even brought “…E non lasciano l’erba…” to the theatre a show that tells, through music, the story of environmental protest through ten historical figures, women and men who shaped environmental culture.
This and much more is Maurizio Melis, with whom, in this interview, we talked about sustainability and the future of the construction sector, between cities and provinces.
Hi Maurizio!
Given your ability to move between science and creativity, it feels natural to ask: what did you dream of becoming as a child?
As a child I always thought I would become a scientist: I was passionate about all scientific disciplines. One of my favourite places was the “G.V. Schiapparelli” Astronomical Observatory at Campo dei Fiori, near Varese. That’s where I discovered my love for science communication which is, in fact, what I do today. I’m halfway between a science communicator and a journalist. When you talk about technology, though, it’s hard to draw a clear line between the two.
And in fact, beyond technology, you talk about the environment, sustainability, the world. And speaking of the world since this question has become a recurring game in Real_People interviews – what is the world for you… in three words?
I would say chaos, evolution and order.
The theory of evolution, which I’m passionate about, allows you to see Nature at work: amid the chaos of mutations, it selects some and produces order. There isn’t really a predefined path, but a form of balance can be traced.
A balance that humans often try to recreate in complex and organised environments such as cities. On Radio24 you have long dealt with Smart Cities. It’s a term we heard a lot for a while, then it faded or perhaps became normalised. Did we stop, or did we become smarter?
We moved from a phase of grand announcements to one in which we do more and announce less. For example, from payment systems to ticketing, public transport has become smarter. Today we take for granted entering the underground with our phone: it’s extremely convenient, but we were only amazed the first time. Then, like all things, we got used to it.
First of all, though, we need to ask ourselves: what do we mean by an intelligent city? And what do we mean by a smart city?
My impression is that the smart city is the latest version of a myth we’ve always pursued, for centuries at least: the ideal city.
Right here in Italy, in the fifteenth century, we formalised this concept and began a line of thinking that still continues today, imagining what the ideal city should be like.
Naturally, from the Renaissance to today, we’ve given different answers. City walls, for example, are not part of today’s idea of the ideal city, whereas in the fifteenth century they very much were.
Today, the answers are multiple. Think of the “15-minute city”: the idea of a place where all services can be reached within that time frame. It’s not the Smart City, but it’s not in contradiction with it either.
The Smart City, conceptually, is born in an IT context: it’s the idea that thanks to sensors and telecommunications networks that allow us to collect and process data and snapshots of the city moment by moment, we can learn to govern the city in real time or at least certain aspects of urban life, such as parking, lighting, traffic, water and energy consumption, hospital bookings, or safety.
That said, in all of this the Smart City remains, like the ideal city, more of a myth to strive for than a clearly defined objective.
Can you give us an example of something “smart”?
The most immediate example is parking – let’s call it “smart parking”. It’s estimated that a good portion of vehicles circulating during peak hours are not actually heading somewhere, but are simply looking for a parking space. Now, if we could circulate information about “available parking” and deliver it to drivers searching for a spot, we could remove 10, 20, even 30% of vehicles from the road. If, instead, we tried to solve the problem by adding parking spaces, we would consume more public land and open endless construction sites.
We can apply the same logic to water, energy, traffic management, patient healthcare management… Smart Energy, Smart Health, Smart Traffic the concept is always the same: we have acquired an unprecedented ability to collect, process and circulate information, and if we use it correctly, we save many other resources, work faster and more precisely. This doesn’t eliminate all problems, nor does it remove the need for green areas or social housing, but it can help in many fields: from health to mobility, from energy to the environment, from schools to industry. And it can do a great deal for sustainability.
Speaking of sustainability, what are the most sustainable innovations in the construction and real estate market?
Let’s start with the fact that in the real estate sector exceptions aside there is a very strong productivity deficit. The industry lives in a state of permanent crisis. From time to time it gets a boost from waves of incentives, but once they end, everything starts over again.
The reason is that the crisis is structural. We are a country with an enormous real estate stock and a dramatically declining population. On top of that, land consumption has reached its limits, so most of the work now involves renovation, which is more complex than building from scratch. So how could everything be fine? And above all, how could it be fine if we keep doing things the way we always have?
To revitalise the market, something new must be invented. And the best thing a company that wants to stay in the market can do is increase productivity. How do you do that? What tools are available? Historically, across all sectors of the economy, the main answers are two: first, you industrialise processes; then, you digitalise them.
These two changes industrialisation and digitalisation have always struggled to enter the real estate sector. Partly because of the large number of micro-companies with few employees, and partly because professionals themselves can’t fully embrace innovation until the rest of the supply chain does.
One example is Off-site Retrofit, introducing prefabrication technologies into renovation projects, as has already happened in new construction.
Instead of having one technician install a window, another glue insulation panels and apply plaster, and yet another lay electrical conduits, a large prefabricated component is produced in a factory, already complete and tailor-made. The panel can even include systems and piping and is simply attached to the wall. The result? A construction site that lasts only a few weeks, and one that is cleaner and safer for workers. Often, scaffolding isn’t even necessary.
In reality, this isn’t a revolutionary concept. Think of windows: there is no longer a carpenter, a glazier, and so on assembling them on site. A technician takes measurements, a factory produces the frame with CNC machines, and a worker installs it.
The idea is to extend this same approach to other components and activities.
So far, this has worked well in Northern Europe (in the Netherlands, for example, the well-known state programme “Energiesprong” has based the energy efficiency of many homes and cities on this technology), where this approach originated and where construction is more standardised than in Italy.
In Italy, objectively, there are fewer contexts suited to this approach. But that doesn’t mean there are none-think of large apartment blocks, for example. Moreover, it’s a competitive approach not only in terms of construction time, but also because it lends itself to economies of scale that reduce costs through resource optimisation. Still, these innovations are often met with a certain degree of fear.
It’s a professional and productive reconversion that must challenge long-standing habits.
Of course, change isn’t free, easy or immediate. But we must understand that these kinds of changes must either be embraced or suffered only to end up being disintermediated by foreign supply chains, as has happened in other sectors.
We’ve talked about big cities, Smart Cities… but Italy isn’t just that. More and more people are moving away from large urban centres. In your opinion, will they be able to find innovation and change in smaller towns and provinces as well?
It’s clear that large cities have dimensions that don’t make sense to apply to medium or small ones: there is no single recipe that works everywhere. For example, it’s obvious that in the countryside you’ll rely more on cars than in a large city with a metro system.
Yet in Smart City rankings, you find both large and small cities such as Bergamo, Trento or Matera. There is no doubt that there is a “smart” dimension even for medium-sized and small cities if anything, some advantages are doubled.
So “technology” and “province” are not opposing concepts.
On the contrary, peripheral areas need innovation even more. If digitalising public administration services is convenient for someone living in a big city who can reach an office in minutes, it’s even more so for someone living in the mountains, with 20 hairpin bends and a 30-minute drive to the nearest municipal office.
Or consider another example: in mountain areas and inner regions, one of the main causes of depopulation is distance from hospitals. Now there’s a lot of talk about flying taxis (large drones for which vertiports take-off and landing infrastructures are already being planned). Imagine, in perspective, what could be done with these vehicles to transport patients in sparsely populated areas like the mountains, where the nearest hospital might be an hour away. In cities, where hospitals are much closer, the advantage would clearly be smaller.
In short, provided we focus on the right challenges, innovation can certainly be a turning point for provinces just as much if not more than for cities.
You are an expert in a present that constantly looks towards the future. Which technological innovation are you most eagerly waiting for (and see on the horizon)?
If I had to choose just one… well, an invention I would love to see though it still seems far away is nuclear fusion. Controlled nuclear fusion, of course, and economically sustainable.
With the hydrogen contained in a glass of water, you could power a city. It would open up extraordinary perspectives: the environment would benefit enormously, as it would mean the end of unsustainable energy sources and of many conflicts born from competing for them.
A clean and affordable nuclear energy source would likely pave the way for the exploration of other planets as well. It’s hard to make predictions.
The Industrial Revolution changed the world because it began using energy much more intensively and, consequently, matter as well. Without coal, for example, you can’t smelt steel.
Nuclear energy is millions of times more powerful than chemical energy, but the nuclear power we know today comes with many issues of acceptability and cost even before safety.
Now, for the first time in decades, real innovations are emerging, such as some fourth-generation nuclear projects.
Fusion would be the ultimate achievement. It would be one of those inventions that change humanity’s destiny, just as the steam engine once did, allowing us to move from an era powered by muscle strength to one powered by machines. That transformed humanity and the trajectory of human progress of course, both positively and negatively. Like all change.