Old buildings, new cities: Analysis of Brussels' Leopold quarter building typologies as a driver to identify optimal retrofitting strategies

In Europe, several studies show that prolonging the life of a building has lower environmental impact than demolishing and building a new one. Retrofitting of residential buildings provides thus a considerable potential in energy conservation and sustainability benefits. But retrofitting an old house is a delicate process. This paper stresses the role of en ergy efficiency retrofitting of old dwellings in Brussels as the key element to achieve the European Union (EU) energy efficiency targets. The approach of this study is to conceive the buildings as a stock rather than individual entities, by developing a preliminary classification by construction system and building comp onents. This approach seeks to contextualize the heritage value, by the identification of the elements that define it, and to achieve holistic improvements of the energy performance of the whole stock in order to highlight the importance and relevance of retrofitting the old residential building sector. The result is a series of scenarios that supposes a first step of the aimed methodology to identify in an early stage the best solutions for this specific part of the building st ock to achieve the energy efficiency targets defined by the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EU, 2010)