Toward building knowledge for supporting sustainable transition of the building stock

The paper discusses the possibility of developing an easy and shareable framework with the aim of building basic knowledge for supporting the energy retrofitting process of the heritage building stock, with spatial detail at the neighborhood or district scale and, in a more general sense, for supporting the urban regeneration process. One of the main strategies to achieve the 20-20-20 Communitarian objectives is the building stock renovation process via energy efficiency improvement. Thanks to the great economical and political interest in the development of technologies and practices for reducing energy consumption and for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) microgeneration, there are favorable conditions to reach the resources to promote a rethinking of the physical components and intangible assets of the cities. The integration of new technologies into the urban building stock could pave the way for urban regeneration with small scale intervention programs that combine the identity of the places with energy efficiency and urban facilities improvement. In order to support this extraordinarily complex process, the Public Administrations (PA) and decision makers need methodologies and tools capable of defining and representing urban transformation scenarios and future views in order to encourage the broad participation of strategies drawing and promote the sharing and transfer of good practices. Tools and models adopt methodologies and approaches of various complexities, purposes and effectiveness. Generally speaking, the specificity of the models often focused only on certain aspects of the process (CO2 emissions, RES potential, Microclimate, Policy assessment…), and the various local baseline data availability on the utilization and physical characteristics of the real estate and on energy consumption require use of methods that are unlikely could be exported to different contexts. The wide implementation of INSPIRE standards for the management and production of spatial data, the spread of new technologies for topographic high detail surveying and for the production of environmental data outline an approach that could be exported in a different context, such as a way to create a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to describe the state of the urban environment. At the same time, the promising SMART metering technologies and the development of methodologies for voluntary feedback acquisition from energy users, or more widely from city users, could overcome the chronic lack of data about energy consumption profiles. However, some barriers still remain, preventing the development of a widely shared approach which are the further research focus