The recent literature emphasizes the significance of occupants’ behavior in shaping home energy demand. Several policies have been defined and tools and technologies have been developed to raise ...people’s awareness and encourage energy-saving practices at home, but households’ energy demand keeps rising. The thesis is that the fundamentals on this topic are still unclear and that available tools, strategies and measures should be approached in a more integrated way, as they are not now effective enough to encourage energy savings. How these could be successfully combined is still a major knowledge gap. Thus, this article proposes a critical review of the literature to discuss the potential role of end users in energy conservation at home, preparing the ground for truly effective engagement strategies and tools to encourage behavioral change. To that end, a systematic literature review is performed, including over 130 relevant articles. According to the critical interpretation of their content, after years of technologically driven strategies, the most promising approaches capable of overcoming the intention–action gap are those more user-centered. However, relying solely on the social aspect is not effective. Synergistic integration of the two main clusters of studies has been identified as a promising field of research for the future.
The global energy crisis has spurred increased investments in energy efficiency and clean energy initiatives; however, the results have fallen short of expected effectiveness. Concurrently, ...population growth and urbanisation drive a persistent surge in energy demands, especially within the residential sector, significant to overall building energy consumption. Current research focuses on residents’ responses to one-shot investments for energy efficiency or clean sources. The renovation wave, involving a massive number of existing buildings, calls for the mobilisation of huge investments that can be hard to afford in the short run. Sustainable behavioural change is complementarily rising as a key asset for maximising the overall estimated energy saving potential. Despite significant efforts to analyse household energy use and promote behavioural transformations, the literature remains gaping about future users, particularly the younger generation, as future leaders of sustainable development who exhibit a more responsible approach towards climate-related issues but also a strong dependency on digital-based solutions, which may influence energy use patterns and living habits, also impacting relations among peers and overall societal sustainability and energy efficiency. This article proposes a systematic literature review to analyse the variables affecting young people’s energy behaviour at home. The aim is to investigate the engines and gaps between strategies or tools for behaviour change and the expected effects, then find potential methods to address that barrier to identify a more promising approach, encouraging the younger generation to translate towards more sustainable energy behaviours.
As the effects of climate change and urbanisation intensify, liveability and comfort in outdoor spaces decrease. Because of large spaces exposed to solar radiation and low crossing of airflows, ...courtyard buildings are extremely vulnerable in this regard. However, there are significant gaps in the literature on outdoor comfort in courtyards, especially regarding the effect of border configuration (including gap position and features), as well that of tree density. The study proposes a methodology—to be used during preliminary design—to compare the effect of alternative scenarios for courtyard buildings on outdoor microclimate, varying both the building perimeter configuration and courtyard vegetation layout. A matrix is set to combine the two variables and select relevant scenarios, which are then simulated in ENVI-met focusing on air temperature, wind speed and physiological equivalent temperature (PET). A case study in Bologna, Italy (humid subtropical climate) is presented as an example of the implementation. The resulting outdoor microclimate maps and frequency diagrams are compared and discussed. It emerges that both variables have a role in outdoor comfort: while gap configuration affects air temperature more (up to a difference of 1 °C), tree density impacts PET by up to 2 °C difference. The methodology can be replicated in several other contexts to support the optimisation of courtyard building design from the early stages.
Housing is the main environmental impact generator (62 %) of the whole building sector, but it also has the greatest reduction potential. Enhancing its performance is thus crucial to sustainable ...development. Social Housing (SH) represents a critical asset within the residential segment, due to the recurrent investment shortage and several environmental, social, and economic related implications. In Italy, SH is held by around one hundred public agencies facing endemic resource constraints for both maintenance and retrofitting, which are limited further by a diffused lack of information regarding the conditions and features of the buildings they manage. In cooperation with an Italian SH agency (ACER Bologna), we developed a speedy tool to compare the technical and economic effects of different refurbishment scenarios on a case-by-case basis. This is not a tool to manage retrofitting works, as the many already available, but a means to help large housing managers overcome the intention-action gap that limit their capacity to properly prioritize interventions based on reliable information. The research focuses on the validation of the fast procedure for estimating the baseline energy scenario, arguing that the relatively small inaccuracies are irrelevant for the scope of the tool and are compensated for by the time saved.
For years, the building sector has been marked by the progressive exploitation of raw materials and the growing production of waste. The product and process innovations, based on waste valorisation ...starting from their geographical location and identification, prefigure potential reductions of environmental impacts. This paper presents the methodology and findings of the mapping of waste from construction and manufacturing processes, carried out in Sardinia to identify possible scenarios of valorisation. The geographical location of waste production both in construction and manufacturing processes, along with their possible reuse, have allowed the definition of some supply chains which are able to process their own waste, according to industrial symbiosis scenarios.
The refurbishment design is a well-known strategy to mitigate environmental impacts of the built heritage, but it is not environmentally neutral. A deep knowledge of the building is required in order ...to maintain the greatest amount of materials – depending on its residual technological performances – and thus containing the consumption of new resources and the production of demolition wastes. Following up existing tools, a method to analyse environmental impacts and support the design at the executive level is presented. Possible intervention alternatives are evaluated from a life cycle perspective, through the embodied energy and CO2 equ indicators, aiming at re-using as much material as possible and preferring new materials with low environmental impact.
Many actions have been undertaken worldwide to cope with climate change and to effectively reach the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Top-down approaches, based on both policies for the ...development of enabling technologies and incentives to promote their wide applications, have been largely adopted in most of the cases. However, the potential contribution of changes in individual behaviours still represents an underestimated field of improvement, despite many scholars have already evidenced their considerable expected impacts. This paper presents the first outcomes of a study on the role of citizens’ behavioural change in reducing GHG emissions, focussing on the functions and performed activities at household level. Starting from a review of the emerging body of literature on the topic, a map is drafted linking the people’s actions and choices and their most relevant effects on each of the environmental categories they can interact with. The mapping provides a list of suitable practices and lifestyles shifts to be adopted, organized by categories and weighted by their emission potential reduction on the whole households’ carbon footprint. This results in a sort of easy-to-read console allowing citizens to operate according to more informed decisions within their homes, thus accelerating the sustainable transition by bottom-up initiatives.
For a long time, the design of factories has been profit-driven only, while their detrimental effects on the environment, perceptual-aesthetic interferences with the surroundings, and social ...disturbances on local communities have been largely neglected. Despite a growing attention towards these topics, literature shows that there is a fundamental knowledge and tool gap on design practices for holistically sustainable factories, and companies are often unaware of both negative and positive effects related to the impact of their sites on the landscape. This paper presents a toolkit that has been developed to support entrepreneurs and designers in devising more sustainable factories through an integrated perspective, which is the great novelty of the approach. The article focuses on one of its tools: a digital atlas of design tactics. These have been mapped in sustainable factories around the world and labelled with an ad hoc faceted classification. Each tactic is then described in an info-sheet, which feeds a web portal. There, the user is assisted in searching for the most suitable tactics and mutual links with other useful strategies. The main potentiality of the atlas is to encourage a holistic design approach by highlighting positive synergies among tactics from different fields.
Forecasts of a drastic increase in temperatures in the coming decades are driving the adoption of design strategies and solutions to improve the livability of urban environments. Increasing attention ...is being paid to the thermal comfort of open spaces by both designers and researchers. Nature-based solutions and man-made devices to improve the comfort of outdoor spaces during summer are spreading, but effective, easy simulation and design support tools for this purpose are still lacking, as most of the available software such as ENVI-met or RayMan cannot model such devices. As Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) is one of the most relevant and comprehensive indicators of Outdoor Thermal Comfort (OTC), this study aims to investigate PET variations of different artificial shading systems and propose a simplified methodology for assessing them through analytical simulations with RayMan software. When modeling the shading elements, the trick adopted for this purpose is to associate different cloud densities with the shading provided by the screens, thus overcoming a gap that affects the software. The procedure is digitally tested in a covered courtyard case study in Bologna (Italy). Diverse options proposed by the designers for textile screening materials have been compared, showing that these reduce by at least 1 °C the PET-gauged thermal stress. Beyond specific results, the main outcome of this study is the procedure developed to simulate sun-shading sail effects on OTC by means of RayMan, which can support designers in planning effective solutions for open space livability in summertime.
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