Resumen de Management, Rehabilitation and Sustainability: A case of intervention on school buildings in Portugal
Given the advanced state of degradation of the Portuguese school patrimony, and the growing necessity of rehabilitation, of both the school buildings, and the pedagogic strategies, in 2007, the public entity Parque Escolar, E.P.E. was created by the Portuguese government. It was proposed to this new company to define a strategy of systemic management, with clear objectives and criteria of planed procedures to rehabilitate the public schools with secondary education. One of the pursued ideals of the Programa de Modernização das Escolas com Ensino Secundário (PMEES) had to do with the recovery, rehabilitation and modernization of the pre-existing buildings. In this context, each project team was incited to consider the characteristics and the recovery viabilities that each building presented, adapting the new functional program to each lot and each school. It was even imposed an obligatoriness in maintaining about 80% of the existing edification. The necessity of preservation of a wide portion of the edification, that mainly results of the concern to rationalize and optimize the interventions expenses control, also introduces the consciousness on the theme of sustainability. Having been recognized the capacities that each infrastructure presented, the preservation attitude constitutes an important factor of minimization of the expenditure of energy, water, and materials. Thereby, with the use and regeneration of a significative portion of the edification, was achieved a minimization of the pollution caused by the materials, which, mostly, could not be recycled. In this conjuncture, apart from the presented virtues, related to the energetic efficiency and to the environmental sustainability, it should not be disregarded the immense pedagogic value that this rehabilitation strategy induces on the social and cultural environment. Due to circumstances absolutely independent from this process, it was verified the transposition of a set of legal diplomas of the European community to the Portuguese legislation, that were, by a mere circumstance, simply due to timing, experienced for the first time in this Program. The enormous infrastructural load inherent (as air quality treatment, security, and central control systems) introduced an exponential increase of energetic costs. In the schools already in operation, it was verifiable that this legislative objective revealed to be a tremendous obstacle to the efficiency and sustainability of this interventions, given that it led to enormous and constant energetic and monetary expenditures. In this context, in many cases, school budgets are hardly able to bear these high costs. Thus, we can conclude that the profound and disruptive change of the paradigm that was necessary lead, inevitably, to the introduction of a set of factors related to the theme of sustainability. Although important steps were taken towards the innovation on the field of energetic efficiency, these rehabilitation interventions in Portuguese schools, due to the incorporation of new legislation, contradicted that objective of assuring a more effective sustainability.
