Human-Centric Building Energy Efficiency Research for Sustainable Development

Dear colleagues,

Nowadays, our research community is aware that the improvement of building energy efficiency is a must for achieving sustainable development at a large scale. The built environment, indeed, accounts for a large amount of global energy consumption. Accordingly, cities make allowance for a large sustainability potential. In this view, it has become increasingly evident that humans play a major role in building energy efficiency and urban sustainability. On the one hand, in light of growing efficiency and complexity of building technologies and systems, users’ energy awareness and behaviour have a significant impact on building energy performance. On the other hand, occupants expect increasingly higher standards for well-being and environmental comfort at home and in their workspace. Therefore, the human perspective needs to be carefully taken into account in building design and operation practice, and users should be educated and given the chance to keep up with sustainable building technologies.

This Special Issue of Sustainability is aimed at collecting scientific contributions designed to keep humans in the loop of up-to-date solutions for achieving building energy efficiency in view of urban sustainable development. To this aim, energy and environmental benefits of human-centric building design and operation should be assessed, including occupants’ well-being. Moreover, the analysis and leverage of users’ energy awareness for more sustainable cities and communities are critical aspects to be addressed.

Dr. Cristina Piselli
Dr. Verena M. Barthelmes
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.