Achieving nearly zero energy consuming cities: this is the goal of three large scale district renovation projects. They are currently being tested in Valladolid, Spain, Genoa, Italy and Kartal - Istanbul, Turkey.

To make a building sustainable, taking into account its climatic conditions is key. No better examples than the three showcase buildings under the EU funded  DIRECTION project.

Sustainable buildings partly depend on control strategies to be energy efficient.

Carlos Bárcena, head of R&D Projects at the Spanish construction Company  DRAGADOS .

A new Directive, dubbed the energy performance of buildings Directive (EPBD), brings the new concept of net -zero energy buildings (NZEB) meaning buildings with a zero energy balance that have a better level of energy performance than the standard energy efficiency requirements in current building codes.

Going from modern energy efficient houses to historic buildings must have been a big leap for you.

Window refurbishments stand out as a viable approach to dramatically reduce energy loss. As their first case of study, the project’s researchers chose to upgrade the windows of the ‘Waaghaus’ (Public Weighing House), a building located in Bolzano, Italy, that is over seven-century-old.

Italian citizens burned their energy bills, huge crowds took the streets of several French cities and Spanish workers rallied for higher salaries.

Imagine living in a building that once leaked heat in the winter and baked in the summer, now retrofitted to be a haven of comfort and efficiency.

From homeless, anonymous guy to TV star, at least for one day. Alexandre has appeared on French media , sitting on a bridge in Lyon, while inviting passers-by to give him money by scanning a QR Code with their smartphone .

Bulgaria has not had the most auspicious of years in terms of its commitment to a green transition. In January 2023, lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to backtrack on plans for an early phase-out of coal-fired power plants.

Primiero is a valley in the Dolomites, on the border between the Italian regions of Trentino Alto Adige and Veneto . Very green and crisscrossed by numerous watercourses, it is best known to tourists for the ski resorts and mountain trails of San Martino di Castrozza .

Where once there were tanks, today there is a residential centre for the disabled , an art laboratory for people with mental health problems, a training centre for immigrants and ex-convicts, a restaurant, a hall for cultural events and a co-working space.

Each year over 3.5 million tourists from all over the world visit Pompeii to admire the ruins left by the eruption of the Vesuvius that, in 79 AD, engulfed it together with the nearby city of Herculaneum.

A strong increase in coal-fired electricity generation and the biggest ever year-on-year increase in global electricity demand caused the global power sector's CO2 emissions to reach an all-time high in 2021 .

In architecture, there are two kinds of sustainability: one simpler, smaller, and ethical in its relationship with the environment and with people; and another which is “fashionable”, used as a label in a speculative way, without an understanding of what it really means.

Maguy Soldevila is a former art teacher. Some years ago, she quit the frenzy and the pollution of the French city of Lyon to move into a typical house of the 1960s, in the small village of Sail-sous-Couzan.

The global transition from an economy underpinned by fossil fuels to an economy powered by renewable energy is well underway. The pace of that transition, however, has come under scrutiny – especially at the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Francesco is an Italian lawyer. He lives in Rome and is now about to move into a new apartment. “It’s a way to get closer to my office,” he says. “I don’t have a car, I just ride bicycle.

Buildings and the construction sector are responsible for over one-third of global final energy consumption and nearly 40% of total direct and indirect CO 2 emissions .