Some efforts to assess sustainability on the urban scale have been made and different tools for measuring the impact on and caused by cities have emerged. However, the sustainability concept varies from region to region, and indicators to measure it should be suitable for the context-specific conditions of the region under study. After doing a comprehensive review of the indicators included in 13 tools developed to assess urban sustainability of cities, this article proposes a new structure of indicators adapted to a Mediterranean city in Spain. The proposed structure is based on a two-level scheme that consists in 14 categories and 63 subcategories, which agglutinate urban sustainability indicators according to their purpose. This structure suggests a set of comprehensible qualitative and quantitative indicators that are easily applicable on neighbourhood or city scales. Given the similar features of Mediterranean countries in terms of environmental and socio-economic aspects, the proposed structure could be extrapolated to other countries with climatic and cultural similarities. Otherwise, the system is a useful tool in the decisionmaking process to help the different stakeholders involved in new urban developments and regeneration projects in existing neighbourhoods, such as developers, urban planners and public administrations.

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This paper provides a model based on Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation to predict the energy performance of existing residential building stocks. The energy demand and the discomfort hours for heating and cooling were taken as response variables and five parameters were considered as potentially significant to assess the building energy performance: urban block pattern, street height-width ratio, building class through the building shape factor, year of construction and solar orientation of the main façade. A total of 240 dynamic energy simulations were run varying these parameters, by using the EnergyPlus software with the Design Builder interface, which allowed the response variables to be determined for a set of sample buildings.Simulation results revealed the most and least significant parameters in the energy performance of the buildings. The model developed is a useful decision-making tool in assisting local authorities during energy refurbishment interventions at the urban scale. Highlights• A model to predict the energy performance of residential building stocks is developed.• The energy demand and the discomfort hours were considered as output of the model.• Bayesian inference based on INLA was the statistical framework of the model• The model is useful to identify urban areas that require urgent energy refurbishment.

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Rapid urban growth in recent years has increasingly compromised urban environments and made urban sustainability assessment quite challenging. Breaking down the city structure into smaller systems enables its complexity to be simplified. This work provides a methodology for defining the urban taxonomy of cities by characterising the urban form patterns of its residential building stock into four different scales. The methodology enables the urban morphology of the city to be standardised, overcoming the barrier of building stock heterogeneity posed by cities, and considers a comprehensive review of the historic and urban planning development as starting point. The methodology proposed herein is supported by GIS technology and can be applied to medium-sized cities. It was validated by applying to the city of Castellón de la Plana, a Spanish Mediterranean coastal city. As main outcome of this research, the urban taxonomy has been obtained and building types in an average block have been standardised, allowing the definition of representative urban form patterns. This methodology can be useful for the stakeholders involved in urban decision-making processes when analysing socioeconomic aspects, energy issues, the impact of different technological options or the promotion of sustainable urban development initiatives, among others.