BBSR document "Developing neighbourhoods in an energy-efficient way".
Published
From building to neighbourhood: The current issue of the specialist journal "Information on Spatial Development" (IzR), published by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), shows how entire urban districts can be developed in a climate-friendly and energy-efficient way.
Based on the KfW programme "Energetic Urban Redevelopment", scientists, urban planners and architects report in this issue on approaches for neighbourhoods that they have tested over six years in initiatives and projects such as TransStadt, Sandy or EnEff:Stadt. The projects focus on integrated concepts, innovative technologies and instruments for energy-efficient refurbishment and owner participation.
The authors show how local governments, redevelopment agencies, municipal housing companies, and individual homeowners in urban districts can save energy and expand renewable energies across buildings, linking topics such as urban development, housing construction, and historic preservation. They look at the relationships between the local players and evaluate the economic viability and acceptance of projects. The focus is also on personnel, money, know-how and the question of how much of this the municipalities need for implementation.
"The articles in this issue illustrate how busy municipalities are working on the energy refurbishment of their neighbourhoods," says BBSR expert Wolfgang Neußer, who provides scientific support for KfW's Programme 432 "Energy-related urban refurbishment". "In order for the energy transition to succeed on the ground, we need to constantly include energy issues in integrated neighbourhood approaches to urban development."
But do the projects actually achieve the intended goals? How can listed buildings be renovated to be energy-efficient? And how can municipalities achieve the heat turnaround? The authors address these and many other questions in analyses, commentaries and interviews.
The booklet can be ordered for 19 Euro plus shipping costs:
service@steiner-verlag.de.
Newly built districts with space-efficient mobility offers
2:14 min - 10/4/2018
On the west side of the Merwedekanal, a new sustainable urban quarter is being built in a central location not far from Utrecht Central Station. An urban development plan for the redevelopment of an industrial area along the canal was drawn up by the municipality of Utrecht together with ten landowners. The plan envisages a mixed district with 17 blocks. Here, 6,000 to 9,000 apartments are to be built for approximately 12,000 residents. The area is to become a showcase for healthy and sustainable living with innovative concepts for recycling, energy production, climate adaptation and mobility solutions. Size: 60 ha. Planned completion: by 2024
As of today, the web database for sustainable settlements and neighbourhoods can be accessed under the domain "sdg21.eu". The previous domains www.siedlungen.eu, www.holzbausiedlungen.de and their subdomains are still active and lead directly to the respective contents.
Why the move to sdg21.eu?
There is a content-related and a practical reason for this. The practical reason is the somewhat shorter spelling, but also that it is easier to pronounce.
The reason for this is that this website is not only about settlements, as www.siedlungen.eu would suggest, but increasingly also about urban districts. There are not as many urban quarters with more far-reaching sustainability concepts as there are sustainable settlements or eco-settlements. However, the urban structure of mixed-use neighbourhoods, in the best case scenario, and the significantly lower land consumption in most cases for the same usable area, is in itself a significant contribution to sustainable development. Mixed-use neighbourhoods are conceptually ideally suited to organising everyday mobility without private cars and are an established and proven method of creating affordable housing in the city.
In order to be able to communicate this topic more directly, there is now an additional access within the sdg21.web database via the URL www.quartiere.net. This link will directly display Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods.
The web database is still available via the domain www.siedlungen.eu available. Sustainable settlements will continue to be a focus of the sdg21.web database, because this is where most projects and experiences have been made so far.
In general, the use of the letters "sdg21.eu" should further help to make the "sustainable development goals" better known. To achieve a distinction to the SDG 2030 I chose the number 21, which stands for the 21st century we are currently in. The SDG 2030 are the "Sustainable Development Goals 2030"The SDG 2030 Millennium Goals were adopted in September 2015 at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in New York by all the countries of the world as a guiding principle with agreed targets. In order to achieve the SDG 2030 Millennium Goals, the sdg21.web database would also like to offer solutions in the settlement and neighbourhood sector with the listed projects. In addition to the domain www.sdg21.eu the URLs www.sdg21.de,www.sdg21.ch and www.sdg21.at offered, which lead directly to the sustainable settlements and neighbourhoods of the respective countries.
The new National Progress Report on the Implementation of the New Urban Agenda shows the state of sustainability in urban development in German municipalities. The report was prepared by the German Institute of Urban Affairs on behalf of the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR).
Berlin. Sustainability issues have become increasingly important in politics as well as in the public sphere in recent years. With the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations, there has been an international roadmap for more sustainability in urban development since 2016.
Through the New Urban Agenda, the Federal Republic of Germany has undertaken to submit a progress report on its implementation every four years. The aim is to document the areas in which German municipalities have achieved successes in terms of sustainability in recent years and where there is still room for improvement. In addition, it is intended to show what hinders the implementation of sustainability goals in the sense of the New Urban Agenda and the 2030 Agenda. The first progress report now available shows very clearly that in many German cities - regardless of size and location - the first steps have been taken towards a sustainable transformation. The report focuses on climate change and mobility as well as digitalisation as a cross-cutting issue.
The report and its indicator-based data analyses illustrate that municipalities' sustainability efforts vary widely. For example, some municipalities prepare inventories on the question of where municipal work can link to goals of the New Urban Agenda. Other municipalities produce detailed sustainability reports based on extensive monitoring of a wide range of indicators.
It is a challenge to try to do justice to this diversity of municipalities with standardized monitoring. Therefore, the monitoring process must be continuously developed in the future and embedded in the context of the sustainability efforts of the federal and state governments. However, there are considerable incompatibilities here - especially with regard to statistical collection methods and available data stocks. With regard to the cities and municipalities themselves, the first progress report on the New Urban Agenda also makes clear that it is often a lack of human resources that prevents municipalities from further expanding their sustainability activities. It also becomes clear that the different framework conditions - demographic, social, economic and fiscal - in the municipalities have a direct impact on the prioritization and implementation of sustainability activities.
Despite these methodological challenges, the systematic recording of sustainability activities in municipalities, as promoted by the New Urban Agenda, can hardly be underestimated. For in essence, it lays an important foundation stone for raising the awareness of the administration and the population for the important topic of sustainability.
In the context of the Green Deal, the EU's tightened targets on the path to climate neutrality envisage a reduction in CO2 emissions of 55% by 2030 and 100% by 2050. Against the background of these tightened parameters, the question arises as to the impact on the energy transition in Germany. Based on its energy system model REMod, Fraunhofer ISE has calculated the consequences of the new EU targets for the expansion of renewable energies in Germany and now presents the results in a short study.
In February 2020, Fraunhofer ISE presented the study "Pathways to a Climate-Neutral Energy System - The Energy Transition in the Context of Societal Behaviour", which investigated the influence of societal behaviour on possible transformation paths of the German energy system towards an almost complete reduction of energy-related CO2-emissions in the year 2050. The calculations carried out with the REMod energy system model were based on the targets set by the German government at the time of preparation, i.e. a reduction in German CO2-emissions by 55% in 2030 and 95% in 2050 compared to 1990.
In response to the tightening of the European targets from 40% to 55% by 2030, which has now been implemented as part of the European Green Deal, the Institute has recalculated. The transformation paths for Germany considered in the February study were revised with a view to reducing Germany's CO2-emissions of 65% in 2030 and complete climate neutrality of the energy system in 2050. The scientists from Freiburg recalculated all scenarios of their study from February (reference, insistence on conventional technologies, unacceptance of large infrastructure measures, sufficiency). As an additional aspect, they added an investigation of the sensitivity for import prices of green hydrogen and synthetic fuels. The short study mainly considers the reference scenario in order to be able to go into more detail on the changes caused by the target tightening. However, the study also identifies corridors for the expansion of a variety of technologies that can be derived from different scenarios. In the case of photovoltaics and wind, annual additions of 10-14 GW and 9 GW respectively are required by 2030 in order to achieve sufficient CO2-free electricity for Germany.
"The update of our energy end-use study shows that achieving the climate protection targets, even with a greater reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than previously assumed, is feasible from a technical and systemic point of view, albeit with greater efforts," says Dr Christoph Kost, head of the Energy Systems and Energy Economics Group and author of the short study. "A target tightening of energy-related CO2-emissions leads to a higher direct or indirect use of renewably generated electricity in the consumption sectors. This in turn requires a much greater expansion of wind and solar power generation facilities." Furthermore, the short study shows that the expansion of fluctuating renewable energies requires a strong expansion of system flexibility.
If we want to achieve a reduction in CO2emissions by 65% by 2030, battery-electric vehicles must account for 30-35% of passenger transport in the mobility sector, for example. In a climate-neutral energy system by 2050, conventional internal combustion engines will be virtually eliminated from passenger car transport as well as from freight transport.
"Heat pumps - used in households or to supply district heating networks - must become a key technology for heat supply with immediate effect," says Institute Director Prof. Dr. Hans-Martin Henning, summarising the results for the building sector. With a view to the CO2-avoidance costs, he adds: "The tightening of the target used here leads to an increase in CO2-avoidance costs. However, these depend to a large extent on the development of final energy demand."
Link to the study "Pathways to a climate-neutral energy system - The energy transition in the context of societal behaviour", February 2020, update December 2020:
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