There is a growing recognition and acceptance that society needs to develop new pathways to achieve a more sustainable future. Our current model of development poses significant challenges when it comes to achieving a more just society based on respect for nature and human rights, and demands a sustainable economy supported by a new circular model supporting the UN sustainable development goals. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) accordingly have developed Master programs that are responsible for providing fundamental services in the joint effort towards sustainability. Meanwhile, leading Universities around the world have developed other very relevant programs. The open and unstructured challenge of sustainability poses an obstacle to existing academic structures. Specifically, the built environment is one of the leading contributors to challenges addressed in the programs such as: Anthropogenic climate change, resource depletion, waste generation and pollution, poverty, and inequity. The Interdisciplinary Sustainable Architecture lab (ISAlab) explores these issues as part of a multidisciplinary approach involving the collaboration of leading Universities from different areas on the world through an innovative initiative. This paper explores the experiences of the ISAlab workshop, which has been taking place yearly in Valencia since 2017. The workshop draws together students from a range of disciplines from across engineering and science, law and the social sciences and from a range of countries and backgrounds, including North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Its purpose is to facilitate a rich co-creative learning environment led by (engineering) academic faculties from across Europe (Spain, the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Ireland) as well as North America (the US and Canada), as well as local experts who helped provide participants with appropriate context and guidance. The objective is educating future engineers that are capable of finding robust ways to implement sustainability at a practical level on the built environment, taking account of the multidisciplinary perspective and with the incentive of solving real-life problems.

Climate change is becoming a dominant concern for advanced countries. The Paris Agreement sets out a global framework whose implementation relates to all human activities and is commonly guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), which set the scene for sustainable development performance configuring all climate action related policies. Fast control of CO₂ emissions necessarily involves cities since they are responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) is clearly involved in the deployment of SDG 13 (Climate Action). European Sustainability policies are financially guided by the European Green Deal for a climate neutral urban environment. In turn, a common framework for urban policy impact assessment must be based on architectural design tools, such as building certification, and common data repositories for standard digital building models. Many Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) tools have been developed but the growing availability of open data repositories for cities, together with big-data sources (provided through Internet of Things repositories), allow accurate neighbourhood simulations, or in other words, digital twins of neighbourhoods. These digital twins are excellent tools for policy impact assessment. After a careful analysis of current scientific literature, this paper provides a generic approach for a simple neighbourhood model developed from building physical parameters which meets relevant assessment requirements, while simultaneously being updated (and tested) against real open data repositories, and how this assessment is related to building certification tools. The proposal is validated by real data on energy consumption and on its application to the Benicalap neighbourhood in Valencia (Spain).

Starting from historical environmental records of the Benicalap neighbourhood in Valencia, this paper presents an energy model contributing to the assessment of carbon-neutral city policies for several nature-based solution (NBS) pilots extended to the neighbourhood level and combined with building façade renovation proposals. Accurate monitoring of several NBS pilot strategies was studied to validate a computational-fluid-dynamic (CFD) microclimate flux (both storage heat flux and latent heat flux) model, allowing a joint understanding of humidity and heat dynamics for the pilots under study. When expanded at a neighbourhood level, the combined effect of NBSs and energy dynamics (from buildings and vegetation) on neighbourhood microclimates is used to assess the optimal combination of urban renovation policies for energy efficiency and consequently carbon footprint reduction.

A key barrier to achieving sustainability in 15 minute cities is the efficiency of supply-chain logistics, particularly in historic urban districts characterized by dense and heritage-protected urban forms. This article presents a data-driven urban methodology to optimize last-mile logistics in Ciutat Vella (Valencia, Spain). Within the ENACT 15 min cities project, a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) was developed, combining iterative geospatial adjustments to the logistics network under changing boundary conditions with a demand-estimation model derived from the Valencia open-data platform. Using cadastral and field-survey data, the workflow simulates and optimizes the selection of vacant commercial premises as urban logistics hubs. A genetic algorithm minimizes oversupply, maximizes demand coverage, and improves spatial balance. The methodology also estimates the resulting carbon footprint, demonstrating that the optimized configuration enhances sustainability and service efficiency in dense historic settings. The approach is generalized to other urban contexts.