Nowadays, there is an increasing concern about sustainable urban energy development taking into account national priorities of each city. Many cities have started to define future strategies and plans to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Urban energy scenarios involve the consideration of a wide range of conflicting criteria, both socio-economic and environmental ones. Moreover, decision-makers (DMs) require proper tools that can support their choices in a context of multiple stakeholders and a long-term perspective. In this context, Multicriteria Spatial Decision Support Systems (MC-SDSS) are often used in order to define and analyze urban scenarios since they support the comparison of different solutions, based on a combination of multiple factors. The main problem, in relation to urban energy retrofitting scenarios, is the lack of appropriate knowledge and evaluation criteria. The latter are crucial for delivering and assessing urban energy scenarios through a MC-SDSS tool. The main goal of this paper is to analyze and test two different methods for the definition and ranking of the evaluation criteria. More specifically, the paper presents an on-going research study related to the development of a MC-SDSS tool able to identify and evaluate alternative energy urban scenarios in a long-term period perspective. This study refers to two Smart City and Communities research projects, namely: DIMMER (District Information Modeling and Management for Energy Reduction) and EEB (Zero Energy Buildings in Smart Urban Districts).

This paper focuses on transformational processes in a post Paris agreement context. It uses IMACLIM-R, an E3 (Environment–Energy–Economy) model allowing for the integration of urban forms, transport dynamics, environmental policies and behaviors. Building upon the study of a set of local low carbon experiments throughout the European Union (EU), the paper explores two contrasted stylized scenarios of the low carbon transition in Europe. It highlights that carbon pricing policies are useful guides for transition but cannot achieve the ambitious objective without significant transition costs. It shows that low carbon experiments in the transport and energy sectors are critical dimensions of complementary measures in favor of green infrastructures. Broadening and upscaling low carbon experiments helps overcome the inertias of the transport sector by fostering radical changes in infrastructures, thereby introducing deep transformations in mobility behavior. This can then generate positive macroeconomic outcomes, even though they are also dependent on specific financial support, calling for a renegotiation of the social contract based on specific fiscal reforms and measures to secure funding for these initiatives. The paper concludes with some research avenues for improving this preliminary work and calls for a better understanding of the complexity of the socio-economic patterns of both the transition and the conditions for an effective implementation.