Transition from traditional historic urban block to positive energy block

Retrofit Strategies for Energy Efficiency of Historic Urban Fabric in Mediterranean Climate

“…Improving energy efficiency while protecting the heritage value of historic buildings is an essential purpose for all studies. Additionally, some studies aim at improving thermal comfort [24][25][26][27][28][29], achieving carbon emissions reductions and assessing energy-efficient measures via life-cycle approach [30,31] and increasing economic performance with regard to cost-effectiveness [25,26,[29][30][31] (Table 1).…”

“…The reason is to speed up the decision-making process in determining retrofit solutions and provide a higher level of energy-efficient improvements [23,24,[27][28][29][30]34]. Several studies also present overall methodologies on deciding and evaluating the effects of energy-efficient retrofit solutions while avoiding the potential risks for historic building stock [23,31,32,35]. Eriksson et al (2014) presented a methodology developed for EU Historic Districts' Sustainability (EFFESUS) research project to analyze the impacts of energy-efficient measures on heritage significance in a historic district in Visby, Sweden [35].…”

“…In the study of Sugar et al (2020), the heritage-respecting energetic retrofit methodology was developed for the historic building stock of Budapest, Hungary, based on the EPBD [32]. Blumberga et al (2020) presented a decarbonization strategy of urban block in the historic center of Riga, Latvia by discussing the impact of energy efficiency measures on historic heritage values [31].…”

“…When planning large-scale retrofit process, extensive data collection and energy investigations are inevitable to define building characteristics, energy behavior and energy saving potential of building stock [23,31,32,34,36,37]. Building categorization is another significant indicator to determine urban typologies and, therefore, appropriate solutions are to be applied in accordance with district scale.…”

Integrated and smart design for buildings and communities

“…Globally, building codes and standards have been established towards improving the performance of buildings, targeting zero energy levels [3,5]. Transitioning from the building to the city level, zero energy districts [6], eco-districts [7], green neighborhoods [8], positive energy blocks [9], positive energy districts [10] have been approached in defining the aspects of future urban sustainability. Current literature includes mostly theoretical studies for the creation of zero energy communities and rare results from implemented cases.…”