Sustainable urban renovation is characterized by multiple factors (e.g., technical, socio-economic, environmental and ethical perspectives), different spatial scales and a number of administrative structures that should address the evaluation of alternative scenarios or solutions. This defines a complex decision problem that includes different stakeholders where several aspects need to be considered simultaneously. In spite of the knowledge and experiences during the recent years, there is a need of methods that lead the decision-making processes. In response, a methodology based on a KPI-driven approach for urban renovation at district level is proposed in the European Smart City project CITyFiED. The methodology is a procedure with the energy efficiency as main pillar and the local authorities as client. It is composed of seven phases that ensures an effective dialogue among all the stakeholders, aiming to understand the objectives and needs of the city to deliver a set of customized Strategies for Sustainable Urban Renovation. In order to provide guidance and quantitative criteria, three levels of indicators are integrated into the approach: City Level Indicators (L1) at city & district level, Project Level KPIs (L2), and Impact Assessment Indicators at city level (L3).

The urban growth is estimated to reach up the 66 % by 2050 and consequently the need of resources within the cities will increase significantly. This, combined with the 40 % of energy consumption and 36 % of CO₂ emissions of the building sector, makes necessary to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable cities. The CITyFiED project contributes to this transition, aiming to develop an innovative and holistic methodological approach for energy-efficient district renovation and deliver three large scale demonstration cases in the cities of Lund (Sweden), Laguna de Duero (Spain) and Soma (Turkey). CITyFiED methodology consists of several phases that ease the decision-making tasks towards the district renovation, considering the energy efficiency as the main pillar and local authorities as clients. For the case of Torrelago district (Spain) the intervention consists of a set of energy conservative measures including the façade retrofitting of 143.025 m² of living space in 31 twelve-storey buildings; the renovation of the district heating network with a new biomass thermal plant; the integration of renewable energy sources, including a micro-cogeneration system, and the installation of individual smart meters. After the renovation action, one-year monitoring campaign is ongoing. The CITyFiED monitoring platform will collect information from the energy systems and deliver environmental, technical, economic and social key performance indicators by March 2019. At the end of the project the achievement of the predefined goals will be verified: up to 36 % of energy saving and 3,429 tons-CO2/yr emissions saving covering the 59,4 % of the energy consumption with renewable sources

The holistic modelling approach required for the long-term integrated urban energy planning is becoming a big challenge since the complexity of cities, as well as their commitments are increasing rapidly. Many municipalities require technical support during the definition of the direction of their long-term energy transition plans. Innovative modelling approaches and the ex-ante impact assessment are necessary steps of the process since the direction adopted by the city will have many long-lasting implications not only in the energy and climate dimensions but also in their social and economic development. This paper presents the overall methodological and modelling approach and the initial results of the developed Advanced Integrated Urban Planning process that has been validated by its application in the cities of Helsinki, Hamburg and Nantes.

The direction adopted for the energy transitions towards a low carbon future will have long lasting implications in other aspects beyond the Climate Change. However, cities are becoming increasingly complex and a detailed knowledge is required for a long-term energy planning, which is frequently not available in city decision making processes. This paper describes a multi-criteria ex-ante impact assessment methodology developed for the building sector energy planning, which combines energy modelling and life cycle analysis with the regional macroeconomic analysis through the supply chain evaluation. The methodology is applied to the city of Donostia, demonstrating the importance of simultaneously considering various potentially conflicting criteria for the prioritization of scenarios.