Neighbourhood Modelling for Urban Sustainability Assessment

Measuring the sustainability of neighborhoods: A systematic literature review

Neighborhoods have received worldwide interest in sustainability assessment due to their suitable scale for representing the relationship between the individual and the city. Consequently, this has led to a focus on developing neighborhood sustainability assessment (NSA) systems and, thereby, studying the prominent NSA tools. Alternatively, this study aims to uncover formative concepts shaping the assessment of sustainable neighborhoods based on a systematic review of the empirical work by researchers. The study included a Scopus database search for papers measuring neighborhood sustainability and a literature review of 64 journal articles published between 2019 and 2021. Our results suggest that criteria related to sustainable form and morphology are the most widely measured criteria in the reviewed papers, interconnected with multiple aspects of neighborhood sustainability. The paper contributes to expanding the existing knowledge on neighborhood sustainability evaluation, further adding to the literature on designing sustainable cities and communities and achieving Sustainable Development Goal 11.

City Regeneration through Modular Phase Change Materials (PCM) Envelopes for Climate Neutral Buildings

Climate change is driving urban development policies for nearly all cities, which are responsible for over 40% carbon emissions in the world. UN SDG 11 (“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”) defines critical indicators focused on carbon footprint reduction through green policies and city heritage preservation. Urban regeneration should ensure climate comfort for citizens while enhancing legacy urban resilience. New solutions for urban regeneration such as Phase Change Materials (PCMs) provide inexpensive energy adaption solutions by reducing peak thermal loads, and their market share is growing yearly by 16% (OECD market trends). However, these materials must be integrated into recyclable flexible building elements to ensure tailored responses to different seasons and climates. Modular PCM elements working together with Passive Haus techniques have demonstrated their flexibility. This paper presents a new, efficient, and sustainable modular solution for PCM-based building envelope regeneration projects implemented jointly with Passive Haus strategies and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) at street level. The efficiency of the proposed strategy is demonstrated though a simplified Digital Twin of the Benicalap neighbourhood in Valencia, Spain. The model simulates the climate evolution at the neighbourhood level, and can be used in any urban background to obtain a new carbon footprint which is then used as the main criterion for joint impact assessment of the proposed modular PCM-based building envelopes.

Combined Greening Strategies for Improved Results on Carbon-Neutral Urban Policies

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.

Digital Twin Technology Challenges and Applications: A Comprehensive Review

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or process capable of collecting information from the real environment to represent, validate and simulate the physical twin’s present and future behavior. It is a key enabler of data-driven decision making, complex systems monitoring, product validation and simulation and object lifecycle management. As an emergent technology, its widespread implementation is increasing in several domains such as industrial, automotive, medicine, smart cities, etc. The objective of this systematic literature review is to present a comprehensive view on the DT technology and its implementation challenges and limits in the most relevant domains and applications in engineering and beyond.