Abstract
Climate change is becoming a dominant concern for advanced countries. The Paris Agreement sets out a global framework whose implementation relates to all human activities and is commonly guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), which set the scene for sustainable development performance configuring all climate action related policies. Fast control of CO2 emissions necessarily involves cities since they are responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) is clearly involved in the deployment of SDG 13 (Climate Action). European Sustainability policies are financially guided by the European Green Deal for a climate neutral urban environment. In turn, a common framework for urban policy impact assessment must be based on architectural design tools, such as building certification, and common data repositories for standard digital building models. Many Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) tools have been developed but the growing availability of open data repositories for cities, together with big-data sources (provided through Internet of Things repositories), allow accurate neighbourhood simulations, or in other words, digital twins of neighbourhoods. These digital twins are excellent tools for policy impact assessment. After a careful analysis of current scientific literature, this paper provides a generic approach for a simple neighbourhood model developed from building physical parameters which meets relevant assessment requirements, while simultaneously being updated (and tested) against real open data repositories, and how this assessment is related to building certification tools. The proposal is validated by real data on energy consumption and on its application to the Benicalap neighbourhood in Valencia (Spain).
Highlights
Regeneration is a continuous process through the city life which should be considered the basis for evaluating the sustainability of urban environments [1]
This paper proposes an adaptive model framework implemented at neighbourhood scale for a performance-based comparison, regarding life cycle analysis (LCA), of urban regeneration alternatives based on construction strategies focused on energy performance of buildings in a given environment
The LCA evaluation is compared to the measured consumption data obtained from the electric company (Iberdrola)
Summary
Regeneration is a continuous process through the city life which should be considered the basis for evaluating the sustainability of urban environments [1]. The guiding principles might defer from urban expansion to reallocation of social habits, services, and processes and above all land economic value. Cities are living organisms whose metabolism is controlled by processes, costs and urban policy. In order to face the ever-increasing problems raised by cities, including social disintegration, economic recession, environmental pollution, and urban function deterioration, studies on urban renewal have received significant attention worldwide [2,3]. Starting from the comparative results from several energy simulations a reference database for individual building typologies was obtained [12] and tested against monitored data [13]. It can be concluded that the energy performance of a given building can be estimated additively from the individual envelope elements. Key determining factors such as element geometry and its exposure to climate conditions have to be included [13]
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