With an increase of global energy demand arising in urban settlements, the key challenges for the urban energy transition include analysis of energy efficiency options and the potential of renewable energy systems within the existing building stock, making cities a key actor in the transition success. In Urban Energy Systems for Low Carbon Cities, indicators to evaluate urban energy performance are introduced and the status quo of monitoring and efficiency valuation schemes are discussed. The book discusses advances on the state-of-the-art of research in a number of key areas: - Energy demand and consumption mapping and monitoring - Optimization of design and operation of urban supply and distribution systems - Integration of renewable energy and urban energy network models - Demand side management strategies to better match renewable supply and demand and increase flexibilities With innovative modelling methods this book gives a real bottom-up modelling approach used for the simulation of energy consumption, energy conversion systems and distribution networks using engineering methods. - Provides support and guidance on the energy transition issues relating to energy demand, consumption mapping and monitoring - Includes examples from case study cities, including Vienna, Geneva, New York and Stuttgart - Analyzes the potential of energy management strategies in urban areas

This book addresses key topics in the current deliberations and debates on low carbon cities that are underway globally. Contributions by experts from around the world focus on the key factors required for creating low carbon cities. These include appropriate infrastructure, ensuring co-benefits of climate actions, making best use of knowledge and information, proper accounting of emissions, and social factors such as behavioral change. Readers will gain a better understanding of these drivers and explore potential transformation pathways for cities. Particular emphasis is given to the current situation of energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the urban level, stressing the complexity of measuring GHG emissions from cities. Chapters also shed new light on the long-term transformation pathways towards low carbon. This book discusses key challenges and opportunities in all these domains to aid in creating low carbon cities, making it of value to policy makers, researchers in academia and consultants working on climate change and energy issues. “The low carbon cities agenda is of bold ambition and demands rapid societal transformation. This book provides invaluable information and analysis on how the goals of this agenda can be achieved and what will be the significant obstacles in the way. The content in the book goes below the surface to reveal on-the-ground economic, engineering and equity issues that are at the heart of the Paris Climate Agreement and the ensuing policy debates. In this way, Creating Low Carbon Cities serves as a critical scholarly benchmark and as a toolkit for further action." William Solecki, Professor, Institute for Sustainable Cities, City University of New York "Creating Low Carbon Cities provides a refreshingly critical approach to low-carbon urban development, what has been achieved so far and the challenges ahead. It will be an important data-driven resource for local leaders, sustainability practitioners and urban planners.” Ms. Monika Zimmermann, Deputy Secretary General, ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability

This book investigates three main characteristics of future urban energy system for buildings, including flexibility, resilience and optimization. It explores the energy flexibility by considering renewable energy integration with buildings, sector coupling, and energy trading in the local energy market. Energy resilience is addressed from aspects of future climate change, pandemic crisis, and operational uncertainties. Approaches for system design, dynamic pricing and advanced control are discussed for the optimization of urban energy system. Knowledge from this book contributes to the effective means in future urban energy paradigm to closely integrate multiple energy systems (i.e., distribution, mobility, production and storage) with different energy carriers (i.e., heat, electricity) in an optimal manner for energy use. It would facilitate the envision of next-generation urban energy systems, towards sustainability, resilience and prosperity. This book targets at a broad readership with specific experience and knowledge in energy system, transport, built environment and urban planning. As such, it will appeal to researchers, graduate students, engineers, consultants, urban scientists, investors and policymakers, with interests in energy flexibility, building/city resilience and climate neutrality.

In China, as Internet of Things and cloud-computing have been widely used in various areas, the concept of Intelligent City quickly became one of the most exciting topics in urban development. Various institutes and organizations (e.g., National Technology Department, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences) proposed their ideas on how to build intelligent cities in China. Intelligent City has tremendous benefits to modern China. First of all, China needs to construct its own intelligent cities in order to realize the economic transformation (from extensive to intensive, from low end to high end and from follower to leader), the industry upgrade, as well as transformation in city development. Secondly, Intelligent City is also an important new approach to boost China's economy since the traditional economic forms, such as real estate, automobiles, and import and export, are currently in a downtrend. Most importantly, utilizing the high-tech methods can help us build low-carbon cities. According to estimates, by building intelligent cities, we are able to increase the efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction by 30%-40%. In order to facilitate the healthy development of intelligent cities in China, build the competitive advantage of Chinese cities in the world, and respond to the high demand for information on Intelligent City from readers, this book discusses in detail the status, current problems, perspectives and methods in the development of Intelligent City in China.

Low Carbon Cities is a book for practitioners, students and scholars in architecture, urban planning and design. It features essays on ecologically sustainable cities by leading exponents of urban sustainability, case studies of the new directions low carbon cities might take and investigations of how we can mitigate urban heat stress in our cities’ microclimates. The book explores the underlying dimensions of how existing cities can be transformed into low carbon urban systems and describes the design of low carbon cities in theory and practice. It considers the connections between low carbon cities and sustainable design, social and individual values, public space, housing affordability, public transport and urban microclimates. Given the rapid urbanisation underway globally, and the need for all our cities to operate more sustainably, we need to think about how spatial planning and design can help transform urban systems to create low carbon cities, and this book provides key insights.

This book is based on multidisciplinary research focusing on low-carbon healthy city planning, policy and assessment. This includes city-development strategy, energy, environment, healthy, land-use, transportation, infrastructure, information and other related subjects. This book begins with the current status and problems of low-carbon healthy city development in China. It then introduces the global experience of different regions and different policy trends, focusing on individual cases. Finally, the book opens a discussion of Chinese low-carbon healthy city development from planning and design, infrastructure and technology assessment-system perspectives. It presents a case study including the theory and methodology to support the unit city theory for low-carbon healthy cities. The book lists the ranking of China’s 269 high-level cities, with economic, environmental, resource, construction, transportation and health indexes as an assessment for creating a low-carbon healthy future. The book provides readers with a comprehensive overview of building low-carbon healthy cities in China.

Energy is essential to all human activities as well as critical to social and economic development. Sustainable energy planning encompassing the concept of smart cities has a high potential to significantly contribute to climate change mitigation. For improved energy efficiency, it is essential to find low carbon solutions for the urban environment. The integration and management of energy supply with predominant exploitation of local resources is examined through the fundamental concept of exergy. This book can assist in decision making, with regard to sustainable energy design both at a national and local level.

Rethinking Urban Transitions provides critical insight for societal and policy debates about the potential and limits of low carbon urbanism. It draws on over a decade of international research, undertaken by scholars across multiple disciplines concerned with analysing and shaping urban sustainability transitions. It seeks to open up the possibility of a new generation of urban low carbon transition research, which foregrounds the importance of political, geographical and developmental context in shaping the possibilities for a low carbon urban future. The book’s contributions propose an interpretation of urban low carbon transitions as primarily social, political and developmental processes. Rather than being primarily technical efforts aimed at measuring and mitigating greenhouse gases, the low carbon transition requires a shift in the mode and politics of urban development. The book argues that moving towards this model requires rethinking what it means to design, practise and mobilize low carbon in the city, while also acknowledging the presence of multiple and contested developmental pathways. Key to this shift is thinking about transitions, not solely as technical, infrastructural or systemic shifts, but also as a way of thinking about collective futures, societal development and governing modes – a recognition of the political and contested nature of low carbon urbanism. The various contributions provide novel conceptual frameworks as well as empirically rich cases through which we can begin to interrogate the relevance of socio-economic, political and developmental dimensions in the making or unmaking of low carbon in the city. The book draws on a diverse range of examples (including ‘world cities’ and ‘ordinary cities’) from North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Africa, India and China, to provide evidence that expectations, aspirations and plans to undertake purposive socio-technical transitions are both emerging and encountering resistance in different urban contexts. Rethinking Urban Transitions is an essential text for courses concerned with cities, climate change and environmental issues in sociology, politics, urban studies, planning, environmental studies, geography and the built environment.

This book presents the energy system roadmaps necessary to limit global temperature increase to below 2°C, in order to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change. It provides a unique perspective on and critical understanding of the feasibility of a well-below-2°C world by exploring energy system pathways, technology innovations, behaviour change and the macro-economic impacts of achieving carbon neutrality by mid-century. The transformative changes in the energy transition are explored using energy systems models and scenario analyses that are applied to various cities, countries and at a global scale to offer scientific evidence to underpin complex policy decisions relating to climate change mitigation and interrelated issues like energy security and the energy–water nexus. It includes several chapters directly related to the Nationally Determined Contributions proposed in the context of the recent Paris Agreement on Climate Change. In summary, the book collates a range of concrete analyses at different scales from around the globe, revisiting the roles of countries, cities and local communities in pathways to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make a well-below-2°C world a reality. A valuable source of information for energy modellers in both the industry and public sectors, it provides a critical understanding of both the feasibility of roadmaps to achieve a well-below-2°C world, and the diversity and wide applications of energy systems models. Encompassing behaviour changes; technology innovations; macro-economic impacts; and other environmental challenges, such as water, it is also of interest to energy economists and engineers, as well as economic modellers working in the field of climate change mitigation.