Combining Territorial Data With Thermal Simulations to Improve Energy Management of Suburban Areas

Urban sprawl has been identified as a major issue for sustainable development. Energy consumption in suburban buildings, in particular, is a widespread issue because detached types of houses require significantly more energy to be heated than more compact urban forms. Energy efficiency is often presented as a viable approach to the mitigation of climate change, but research and studies mainly contend with individual buildings and do not address this issue at larger territorial scales or for a whole building stock. In this respect, this paper first presents a morphological definition of urban sprawl. This definition uses territorial and cadastral data available for the Walloon region of Belgium. Using this definition, a suburban type classification adapted to thermal studies is drawn up. A representative block of each type is selected to model energy use and to determine the total energy consumption of the whole suburban building stock. An application is then presented concerning a comparison of potential energy savings associated with several renovation strategies. The results of this exercise are presented and highlight the benefits of combining Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, territorial data and thermal simulations for the efficient energy management of suburban areas at the scale of the whole building stock.