Urban policies and sustainable energy management

This paper describes the results of the first year of the SoURCE - Sustainable Urban Cells - research project. The project's main objective, focused on sustainable management of urban areas from an interdisciplinary and holistic approach, is to experience the sustainable reshaping of the city considering a minimum core of the larger city's model, conventionally called the urban cell. The methodological approach aims to evaluate and improve the energy flows from nature to city, from city to itself and from city to nature. The method seeks to provide a standard procedure to evaluate the performance and optimization of the urban cell energy balance through innovation technology either with the use of renewable resources or in the final consumptions. The methodology was tested in a case study of a single urban cell. Since any urban cell will have a different energy balance due to local characteristics and functions, an urban cell can be added to a close one (generating a urban cells grid) in order to ensure a better energy balance from the addition of more than one urban cell. The project foresees the elaboration of tools and strategies for citizen information, training them about energy sustainability, with special emphasis on young people. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.