Characterisation of urban patterns at the neighbourhood scale as an energy parameter. case study: Castellón de la plana

Abstract

According to the World Organization Prospects 2014 Revision (United Nations), the population in European cities has reached 73%, and 80% is forecast in forthcoming decades. Therefore, urban areas are large consumers of resources. Integrated Urban Regeneration (IUR) is implementing strategies to achieve a smart, sustainable and socially inclusive (Declaration of Toledo, 2010) urban development since the challenge is greater in existing urban environments, where it is not possible to act in the design phases. Therefore, an analysis of the characteristics of urban planning and building types that make up a city and its neighbourhoods is required to identify those typologies with energy vulnerability prior to implementing IUR. This paper focuses on the energy factor as one of the items to consider in IUR. This will be useful in the decision making that determines which urban areas require more urgent intervention. The urban morphology of a Mediterranean medium-sized city is characterized herein: Castellón de Plana (180,690 inhabitants, according to the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE) 2010). Firstly, this city’s historical urban development is analysed to determine different urban areas. Then existing building types are identified. Finally, these types are associated with the urban design and the results are represented by a Geographic Information System (GIS). The study results provide a number of urban morphology types with different layouts which represent the Mediterranean city, as well as the building typologies represented in each urban typology. Each presented set is likely to have different energy performance, and the findings can be extrapolated to other Mediterranean cities with similar characteristics to the city studied herein. The collected information will be useful for further research to analyse the energy performance of the existing building stock in the city by taking into account the building type integrated into a consolidated urban design.