City planning and energy efficiency: towards an integrated urban design and planning process

Abstract

Urban environments are great consumers of energy. In Spain, the housingservices sector is responsible for almost 30% of the total energy consumption. There are many initiatives towards the reduction of energy consumption in buildings. However, many of the alternatives are diminished due to a lack of a holistic approach in the planning, design, and building of new communities. This paper reports a new methodology that integrates concepts of energy efficiency in the overall planning and design process. A community in Toledo, Spain, serves as a case study to extract conclusions later applicable to other areas. The methodology evaluates energy efficiency solutions at different scales and stages within the planning and building process of both neighbourhood and buildings. It then revises the planning and building protocols for the optimization of the community's energy efficiency, contemplating their practical applicability. With this, the proposed integrated methodology is improved and adapted to a widereaching design of energy efficient urban communities.

Energy efficient building block design: An exergy perspective

“…Only a limited number of studies [1,3,8,16,18] evaluated the energy performance, using only some of the parameters, and they still only conducted a quantitative research.…”

Exergy analysis of mass housing areas: Mavişehir I and II, Izmir

“…Most of them focussed on the calculation of the energy consumption of the buildings. Another study (Barreiro et al, 2009) investigates the energy efficiency of an area and proposes an integrated energy supply methodology that examines the relations between planning and efficiency. Meggers and Lejbundgut (2012) studied the utilisation of exergy and energy concepts for low exergy system design in the search for a better performance by buildings.…”