Urban regeneration and sustainable communities: reflecting on energy-related roles, attitudes and responsibilities

Nowadays, the urban environment is considered to be a key player in the management of climate change related issues. Improving urban planning and design, providing affordable housing and lowering energy consumption are strategic points in the current debate on sustainable cities, as the inclusion of such topics in the Habitat III Urban Agenda approved in 2016 by United Nations clearly demonstrates. With 70% of Europe’s 2050 housing stock already built, urban regeneration represents the key strategy to cope with the increasing demand of integrating sustainability principles in everyday life. When it comes to residential buildings, the fragmentation of housing properties – typical of South-East Europe countries – represents a critical obstacle to the implementation and scalability of regeneration practices. Social housing associations with their large stock portfolios, either individually or in partnership with others, are best playground to implement urban regeneration strategies, both combining interventions to the open space and the built environment. According to the EU Directives (European Commission, 2010; European Commission, 2012), public authorities have the obligation to lead the renovation process of their building stock and showcase an exemplary role. Considering the exclusive role of social housing providers in building management and the similarities in the regulations for providers, working with them and their tenants through information and training practices could easily lead to a multiplier effect. Coherently with Urbact II programme (Czischke et al., 2015), the paper refers to the term urban regeneration as a set of regeneration actions, policies and processes within a city addressing interrelated technical, spatial and socio-economic issues towards the reduction of environmental impact, mitigation of environmental risk and improvement of environmental quality of urban systems, lifestyles and assets. Energy is considered to be a prominent driver to address urban regeneration (Gargiulo, Lombardi, 2016), mainly due to the availability of financial incentives to implement regeneration actions. It has been increasingly recognized that community-based initiatives, being adopted by an increasing number of energy efficiency programmes, have the potential to establish both ownership and acceptance of renovation measures, and responsibility for actions requiring a pro-environmental behaviour change. Such activities are able to achieve multiple benefits in the same environment, resulting in high level of awareness on risks and barriers to the effective transition to sustainable communities. The non-energy co-benefits are even more important in the social housing sector, where energy efficiency of buildings and fuel poverty only represents one aspect of a complex situation. Therefore, in order to guarantee the effectiveness and social acceptance of energy savings measures, a comprehensive approach is needed, diverting the attention from single interventions on housing stock to bottom-up approaches involving the local community and all the relevant stakeholders (Santangelo, Tondelli, 2017). By addressing the interrelationship among different actors through the definition of a decalogue of interventions, the paper focuses on energy as urban regeneration mainstream, exploring the benefits of sustainable community programmes towards urban regeneration and energy efficiency. In the conclusion, the predominance of energy-related interventions for the implementation of sustainable urban regeneration is questioned and further discussed.