Linking the urban-scale building energy demands with city breathability and urban form characteristics

Abstract The scope of this paper is to study the building energy demands of a real urban area and show how urban planning can benefit from relevant insights in the light of energetically sustainable societies and cities. In particular we conduct a multiscale analysis on a validated dataset of the urban energy demands of the Westminster Borough building stock over different seasons as well as on relevant urban information data obtained for the same borough. The aim of this analysis is to investigate the link between urban form characteristics (such as the emerging urban dynamic parameter of the city breathability along with the building height and building packing density) - with the associated urban energy demands for heating and cooling. By using a rigorous scale-adaptive approach, we unveil the intensity of this link between urban energy demands and the urban features and we furthermore deduce how sensitive such links are to the size of the district considered. This new knowledge enables end-users to decipher the degree of impact of proposed actions based on the size of the region over which a decision is to be applied depending on the urban information parameter and the driving interest-question behind the energy management policy.