The Positive Energy District (PED) concept is a localized city and district level response to the challenges of greenhouse gas emission reduction and energy transition. With the Strategic Energy Transition (SET) Plan aiming to establish 100 PEDs by 2025 in Europe, a number of PED projects are emerging in the EU member states. While the energy transition is mainly focusing on technical innovations, social innovation is crucial to guarantee the uptake and deployment of PEDs in the built environment. We set the spotlight on Norway, which, to date, has three PED projects encompassing 12 PED demo sites in planning and early implementation stages, from which we extract approaches for social innovations and discuss how these learnings can contribute to further PED planning and implementation. We describe the respective approaches and learnings for social innovation of the three PED projects, ZEN, +CityxChange and syn.ikia, in a multiple case study approach. Through the comparison of these projects, we start to identify social innovation approaches with different scopes regarding citizen involvement, stakeholder interaction and capacity building. These insights are also expected to contribute to further planning and design of PED projects within local and regional networks (PEDs in Nordic countries) and contribute to international PED concept development.

This article discusses early developments of the Positive Energy District (PED) concept, both in terms of its definition and of its implementation in real world demonstrators. Based on the specific challenges for creating an operational definition for the European +CityxChange project, the feasibility of creating a PED was practically explored by identifying 4 possible subtypes that respond to varying constraints regarding the energy balance of the PED. This article provides the context and describes these 4 ambitions levels: PED_autonomous, PED_dynamic, PED_virtual, and _PrePED; and the 3 boundary modes: geographical, functional, and virtual. The work thus expands on the first general PED definitions as they were put forward in the SET-plan and by the European Commission, while allowing a better response to the specific boundary conditions of PEDs’ physical context. As such, it provides an operational, city-focused, bottom-up PED definition. The present study analyses how these efforts connect to current work being performed on the development of a European PED Framework Definition. In the latter, new elements such as context factors are introduced in order to account for the varying boundary conditions that PEDs must address, and in particular the difficulties of realising PEDs in existing and densely built-up urban areas. Hereby it can be argued that the approach with 4 subtypes is a bottom-up method of addressing the same challenges as a context factor based approach operating in a top-down manner, this time starting from the regional or national renewable energy potentials. Both approaches indeed strive towards an optimum setup of PEDs both within their geographical boundaries and in their interactions with the surrounding energy infrastructures and cities. These efforts are instrumental in helping to prevent that a PED is being regarded as a goal in se, functionally disconnected from its surroundings. There are strong arguments in favour of handling PEDs as building blocks for the broader realisation of carbon neutral cities and regions, thus contributing to the systemic change that is needed to futureproof the built environment as a whole. Without applying this integrating perspective, PEDs risk creating a sub-optimal lock-in within their sites and thus remain one-off experiments, lacking connection to the wider urban sustainability strategies that are needed to properly address today’s energy and climate emergencies. This holds even more when considering the quality-related requirements that come with sustainable urban design and governance. Therefore, this study further explores how PEDs can fully support such a deep urban sustainability transition, and what could consequently be the next steps towards successful and upscaled PED deployment.

A main challenge in building carbon-neutral built environments is the ability to scale and replicate solutions. We examine how to develop low-carbon neighbourhoods and districts, while aiming at climate-friendly and sustainable livable urban environments. We take a view that not only scales up individual building solutions, but embraces the added complexities arising from the scale change and utilizes them for a novel approach. It includes a strong focus on co-creation and open innovation to develop sustainable solutions. In this contribution, we present the approach of the +CityxChange project in implementing Positive Energy Blocks (PEB) through a European H2020 project from the topic of Smart Cities and Communities. A PEB comprises several connected buildings that have a averaged yearly positive energy balance between them. This definition excludes embodied emissions, but allows to focus on the infrastructure and systems between buildings as part of the built environment, and ways to implement and incorporate them within existing cities. The +CityxChange approach relies on co-creating Europe-wide deployment of Positive Energy Districts, with Integrated Planning and Design, Creation of a Common Energy Market, and CommunityxChange with all stakeholders of the city.

Renovation of dwellings for energy efficiency has further implications other than only technical and economic dimensions, such as performance and cost reduction. This paper demonstrates how the renovation of dwellings for energy efficiency impacts spatial quality by crossing technical measures of dwelling renovation with the definition of spatial quality proposed in Acre and Wyckmans (2014). The results of this crossing are developed further into a spatial quality assessment. Spatial quality consists of the interaction between four determinants: (1) views, (2) internal spatiality and spatial arrangements, (3) transition between public and private spaces, and (4) perceived, built and human densities (Acre and Wyckmans, 2014). There are two main challenges in this work: first to demonstrate that energy renovation of dwellings affects spatial quality and second, to create a clear and generic way to indicate and assess this effect that also allows comparability between before and after renovation. The current state of the art in building renovation emphasizes technical performance and efficiency, costs and user responses to technology. However, there is a facet that is hardly explored in the current literature, which is how building renovation affects spatial quality.This paper contributes both to the theory and practice in building renovation. First it emphasizes the relevance of non-technical dimensions such as spatial quality and of the need for a cross-disciplinary approach in energy renovation of dwellings. Second, the paper indicates that energy renovation indeed affects spatial quality in dwellings. The main contribution to practice that this article aims to bring forward consists of the spatial quality assessment for dwelling renovation. The technical measures of energy renovation for the building components of floors, internal and external walls, roofs, windows, mechanical services and controls, built area and the use of renewable energy options are considered in this study in relation to their impact on spatial quality. The aim is to identify and strengthen the connection between energy renovation and people’s well-being through spatial quality. The inattention to the potential of non-technical dimensions such as spatial quality, by stakeholders involved in the energy renovation of dwellings, constitutes a lost opportunity to increase occupants’ receptiveness to energy renovation. This receptiveness can be extended by strengthening the connection between renovation of dwellings for energy efficiency and benefits to occupants’ well-being. This work follows the current European tendency of fostering energy deep renovation to reach Europe’s 2050 aspirations (BPIE, 2011). Deep renovation is an ambitious building renovation strategy that encourages high energy savings measures and the whole building approach (BPIE, 2013). The paper is intended to benefit design professionals, and building owners such as individuals, corporate entities, public sector or real estate portfolio holders, because it points out underlying relations between energy renovation and spatial quality that are often not clearly considered in the renovation of dwellings

As threats from climate change related hazards increase in cities around the world, communities are faced with an urgent requirement for self-evaluation. It is essential to expose and assess potential hazards facing cities, as well as to consider potential impacts and responses. While the promotion of efficiency and promise of protection have been common approaches to hazards in the past, recent events have exposed weaknesses in existing tactics. It has also become more apparent that existing mitigation efforts will be insufficient to prevent some level of climate change, associated hazards, and impacts. Complete protection against all threats is not only impossible but potentially hazardous, as extreme or unanticipated events can exceed the capacity for defence, potentially resulting in catastrophic failures. From this realization of the fallibility of the existing paradigm, resilience has emerged as a useful concept for framing the response of cities to an expanding collection of potential threats. The aim of this article is to consider resilience as it applies to cities, their architecture and infrastructure systems, subsystems, and components, as well as their inhabitants. Resilience characteristics are identified and considered in order to inform the eventual development of a resilience framework with which to assess architecture and infrastructure resilience. This state of the art is instrumental to determine the conditions under which architecture and infrastructure resilience can be defined and measured, in order to guide the consideration of attributes and determine suitable criteria to select and elaborate indicators to help guide future actions and investments.