Mediterranean Urban Landscape. Integrated Strategies for Sustainable Retrofitting of Consolidated City

An analysis of the economic and environmental trends in the last decade shows how the energy demand has increased more rapidly than the GDP growth and the current scenario in 2015 foresees rates substantially unchanged. Given the broad Europe's existing building stock, representing more than 90% of the total, the implementation of thorough energy retrofit and the use of bio-ecological materials is necessary to achieve the objectives set by the European Commission by 2020. Paper deals with the issue of evaluating sustainable retrofit of existing cities by experimenting a methodological process that has the specific goal of implementing “Sustainable Neighborhoods" or "Energy Urban Districts”. Specific attention is given to the detailed evaluation of building maintenance and energy management costs in building life cycle (Global Cost approach) developing a Case Study showing the results of alternative scenarios of intervention. The process is supported by specific tools such as Database Management System (DBMS) and GIS that ease the application.