The Relationship between Urban Density and Building Energy Consumption

Nariman Mostafavi,Simi Hoque,Fernanda Gándara,Mehdi Heris

doi:10.3390/buildings11100455

Abstract

Neighborhood characteristics influence natural urban energy fluxes and the choices made by urban actors. This article focuses on the impact of urban density as a neighborhood physical parameter on building energy consumption profiles for seven different metropolitan areas in the United States. Primarily, 30 × 30 m2 cells were classified into five categories of settlement density using the US Geological Survey’s National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), the US Census, and Census Block data. In the next step, linear hierarchical spatial and non-spatial models were developed and applied to building energy data in those seven metropolitan areas to explore the links between urban density (and other urban form parameters) and energy performance, using both frequentist and Bayesian statistics. Our results indicate that urban density is correlated with energy-use intensity (EUI), but its impact is not similar across different metropolitan areas. The outcomes of our analysis further show that the distance from buildings within which the influence of urban form parameters on EUI is most significant varies by city and negatively changes with urban density. Although the relationship between urban density parameters and EUI varies across cities, tree-cover area, impervious area, and neighborhood building-covered area have a more consistent impact compared to building and housing density.

Highlights

Urban areas are hubs of economic, social, and cultural activity and major consumers of energy and producers of greenhouse gas emissions [1]
We explored the impact of urban density, as a major indicator of urban form, on building energy use in seven major US metropolitan areas
Our research questions were: (1) What proximity to a building is more relevant to be taken into account when the impact of urban density on energy consumption is of concern? (2) What is the impact of urban density—and other urban form parameters—on building energy use intensity (EUI)?

Summary

Introduction

Urban areas are hubs of economic, social, and cultural activity and major consumers of energy and producers of greenhouse gas emissions [1]. These morphologies are referred to as integrated wholes [3] that can be considered at different levels of resolution. These resolution levels are consonant with various components of urban form [4]. Urban form is identified as the physical qualities of the urban natural and built environment, in terms of size, shape, configuration, and settlement density that foster interactions between people, activities, and geographical spaces [5,6,7]. The positioning of buildings and urban blocks, land-use mix, street connectivity, and population density patterns can change transport characteristics and the associated mobile sources of energy consumption and carbon emissions [10,11]

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