August has been a month that could be defined as “calm before the storm”, but this does not mean that it has been literally calm.
During these weeks, I started being an active part of the consultancy group: this allowed me to deal with the very starting point of redevelopment of brownfields, the ‘Desktop study’. It has been quite useful for me, because I can say that now I learned how to understand which pollutant sources can effectively cause damages to the next users of the site. And I have to say that this can be very handy, as an architect/engineer, as I have already been in a situation in which I had to face environmental issues (even if at that time I did not have the tools that English pragmatism provided me). In fact, reusing brownfields for redevelopment is an action that involves environmental management, but to be effective it must be reasonable: it must combine the English pragmatic approach with a bit of good sense and italian reflective approach.
I have also been on site for a gas monitoring process and I could see how weather can affect environmental management: England experienced such a good summer that it took us a couple of months to get the most conservative values of atmospheric pressure.
Another important part of this month has been the work about the Conceptual Site Model (the final part of the environmental reports in which are shown the results of the study) in which I played a quite relevant role: I applied my knowledge about architectural visualisation to get to a product that might improve the value of the whole report, according to what the principal consultant said.
The final part of august has been focused on getting ready for kicking off a very important project (that is why I think we are experiencing a calm period that is going to be followed by a storm): the client is an architectural firm of the area and the project is about the redevelopment of an enormous area in Canterbury. The job is about Geo-investigation and its goal is to define the necessaries actions to make suitable the site for residential use mainly. This involves the soil sampling of a shooting ground affected area, and I have never imagined that this human activity would create environmental issues due to lead contamination.
