Sustainable Urban Futures Through Building Energy Efficiency: Integrating Innovations and Strategies

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, “Sustainable Urban Futures Through Building Energy Efficiency: Integrating Innovations and Strategies”, convenes interdisciplinary research and practice to accelerate decarbonization, resilience, and affordability in cities. We focus on building energy efficiency as system-wide activity integrating technologies, operations, policy, finance, and human behavior at building, district, and grid scales. Integrating mitigation with adaptation and social equity, the issue aims to leverage innovation and transform it into replicable pathways for large-scale influence.

Focus: Synergy of envelope, HVAC, heat pumps, passive design, storage, and renewables with urban microclimate, grid interaction, and occupant-centric controls. Strong emphasis on retrofits and scalable solutions closing the performance gap and yielding co-benefits in health, comfort, and equity.

Scope: Central themes are industrialized and deep retrofits; digital twins and urban building energy modeling; AI-enabled analytics, sensing, and smart controls; grid-interactive efficient buildings, demand response, and virtual power plants; district energy; life-cycle assessment and embodied carbon; measurement and verification, benchmarking, and KPIs; policy, and codes; behavior interventions and governance; urban heat island mitigation and nature-based solutions; resilience to extremes. Methods vary from experiments, field studies, simulations, big-data, techno-economic and policy analysis, and mixed-methods in diverse settings of the Global North and South.

Purpose: To combine evidence and demonstrate cost-effective, equitable, and replicable methods; standardize evaluation criteria; bridge modeled and measured effects; and guide city, utility, owner, and financier decision-making.

Whereas much prior work focuses on addressing technologies, scales, or outcomes separately, this topic enriches the literature by:

(a) uniting operational and embodied carbon with co-benefit accounting;

(b) uniting physics-based and data-driven models with robust validation and open data;

(c) emphasizing levers of implementation—procurement, finance, talent, and governance—to scale from pilots to portfolios;

(d) aligning KPIs for comparability and reproducibility;

(e) expanding geographic and socioeconomic reach; and

(f) linking efficiency with grid flexibility and multi-hazard resilience.

Together, these inputs constitute a comprehensive evidence base to support decarbonization at the city level. 

Dr. Nebojša Jurišević
Guest Editor

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