Holistic Approach for Sustainable Cities and Communities: Best Practices in Living Labs

The construction sector is facing very important economic, environmental, technological, and social challenges, mainly related to climate change and extreme weather events, excess energy consumption, vulnerability of buildings and consequential damage, overpopulation, intensive urbanization, overuse of resources, social inequalities and energy poverty. Sectoral approaches that consider and value individual building performance (e.g., energy efficiency, sustainability, etc.) and not reciprocal interactions and integrations, are not functional to ensure well-being and comfort for the occupants, functionality and efficiency, performance synergy, decarbonization, and sustainable development of the city. It is well known the importance of moving from the widely prevailing paradigm of considering these dimensions in an almost unrelated way to a new paradigm that deals with a holistic view of building sustainability that integrates all relevant aspects in an efficient and implemented way. This work describes how a holistic approach and effective urban modeling, and tools can be used to ensure the implementation of that all potential synergies through technological options, economic and market instruments and measures and behavioral changes. The interactions between buildings and districts, energy communities, cities, ensuring sharing energy and data to reach a high value of self-consumption and self-sufficiency, will be analyzed. The work demonstrates the real application of the holistic approach in supporting a Renewable Energy Community in the town of Termoli in Molise, as a use case in living lab, taking in account the existing technological, governance and legal barriers.