Renewable energy has a crucial role in facing climate change. One promising strategy is the creation of energy communities that require active involvement from a bottom-up perspective. Their implementation is difficult, as they currently rely on local policies, community readiness, and technological availability. The objective of this paper is to provide a qualitative overview of energy community concepts and strategies at the European level. The aim is to identify common approaches that are framing the development of energy communities, and to understand the most successful steps leading to their creation and growth. To achieve this objective, a threefold methodology is provided: (1) an updated review on policies dealing with energy communities at the European and Italian level; (2) a qualitative overview of European-funded projects under the Horizon 2020 work program; and (3) a qualitative overview of some of the most successful existing energy communities in Europe. The results outline a series of considerations and lessons learned that are useful for implementing this transition pathway in a real case, which is also presented in the paper. The conclusions will identify some future directions of this research, particularly in relation to the results coming from the implementation of actions in the real case.

Analyzing data from the Energy Poverty Observatory in Europe, it emerges that more than 50 million households in the EU live in energy poverty (people that cannot heat their homes during winter; cannot make their homes comfortable during the summer; pay their energy bills late). Research studies realized in the last 20 years highlight that making energy demand efficient and effective is the more significant and socially important the more it is able to involve users who are unable to sustain energy demand. The evolution of the research sees a narrowing of the field of investigation by focusing on the user dimension of energy poverty, stressing the role of citizens not only as consumer but also as producers of solutions to tackle energy poverty, real energy communities of agents. The paper aims to provide a systematic literature review highlighting the major findings of the topic, investigating the relationship between spatial and social issues, and looking at the state of energy poverty by addressing the profiling of users and consequently of services useful to overcome their current vulnerable condition. The paper is structured in two core sections. The first one gives the results of a systematic literature review on the energy/fuel poverty topic, the second one deepens the role of communities and individuals need, crucial in defining new design approaches for supportive solutions to tackle energy poverty.

Climate change and its challenges have long been incorporated into the policy-making process. Advocacy actions urge to strengthen the socio-ecological resilience through engagement with stakeholders, feedback recollection, and testing of solutions. Several initiatives have been born to boost cities’ actions toward climate change mitigation and adaptation. Institutional coordinated actions such as transnational municipal networks (TMNs) and non-institutional, grassroots movements for climate action, are among them. The study focuses on four TMNs and two grassroots movements, which have an impact on the European and/or worldwide contexts. They are investigated qualitatively, reflecting on the roles and contributions to climate change that they provide both alone and together. The research questions focus on the instruments/elements/factors that they put in place to support the transition, the key messages, and how these are conferred to their key targets. The initiatives have been investigated in both the grey and scientific literature. The main results show that grassroots movements for climate action and TMNs have the potential to better support cities in their climate transition. However, local governments are urged to take advantage of both initiatives’ ability to develop networks of support, innovation and a sense of belonging. In conclusion, the research states that the two initiatives should be effectively connected and integrated with a complementary role concerning planning actions.

The opportunity to foresee how a physical system might work in advance, resorting to its digital model, explains the general attractiveness of digital twins. The use of digital twins, especially in the manufacturing context, encourages the investigation of the benefits that may bring in many circumstances, ranging from medical to commercial applications. In this work, however, we do not introduce yet another field where digital twins may be applied but, instead, propose digital twins as part of a convergence of technologies that may be put to good use to foster advanced distributed collaboration platforms to support humans in the loop. To clarify our proposal, we contextualize the proposed methodology by providing a conceptual framework related to a Virtual Hackable City, where we explain the advantages of such an approach.