Interconnection between Scales for Friendly and Affordable Sustainable Urban Districts Retrofitting

Abstract

The EU FP7 project FASUDIR (Friendly and Affordable Sustainable Urban Districts Retrofitting) supports the mobilization of the building retrofitting market towards 2020-2050 EU-targets through an Integrated Decision Support Tool (IDST), a software based on a new methodology that will help decision makers identify the best energy retrofitting strategy to increase the sustainability of the whole district. Improving the sustainability of urban environments is a interscalar problem, addressed through a multiscalar and multidirectional approach. A comprehensive urban scale strategy considers the working scale, but the measures at building scale have to be coherent with the global objectives at district and city scale. The FASUDIR IDST and methodology interconnect and visualize information across scales, ensuring comprehensive diagnoses and proper implementation of strategies. Due to the complexity of urban sustainability, interscalarity and multiscalarity, first it has been necessary to identify the possible scales of analysis, to capture various themes and to highlight the horizontal and vertical interconnections between different components. Multiscalarity and Interscalarity affect the three phases of the sustainable retrofitting cycle: diagnosis, decision making and management. The identification of the impact of district solutions on buildings (and vice versa) and their compatibility across scales has been addressed through interconnected building and district Key Performance Iindicators (KPIs). The intervention phases at building level generate new information about specific buildings, enabling more accurate decision making at district level. The methodology articulates the structure of the new information and the feedback generated during the process. To allow information interconnection a strategic information management is key. A multiscale information model based on CityGML, a standard data model issued by the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), will be the baseline structure for all the district-scale information (geometric and semantic) that is necessary for decision making and management, organized into a single interoperable data model that will integrate information from different fields and at different levels of detail.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013) under grant agreement n̊ 609222.