Building community energy retrofitting in urban neighbourhoods: A novel conceptual paradigm

Over the last few years, renovations and retrofits for existing buildings have been acknowledged as crucial strategies for attaining energy conservation and sustainable objectives. Nevertheless, current studies investigations have only focused on the retrofit measures on an individual building bounded by building ownership premises, ignoring the impact of the surrounding built environment. Hence, retrofitting solutions are only extracted from individual building energy systems while they can negatively impact on the surrounding environment. This study investigates whether cost-effective solutions can be found if the scale of energy retrofitting is extended from individual buildings to communities of buildings. For this purpose, this paper presents a novel coupling method for optimising building retrofit strategies by integrating community-scale and building-scale interventions using a case study of Amman, Jordan. The research combines microclimate computational fluid mechanics (CFD) simulation (ENVI-met) and building energy performance analysis (DesignBuilder). Through systematic evaluation of nine scenarios at the community level and calibrated interventions at the building level designed to achieve equivalent energy reductions, the study demonstrates that community-scale approaches offer superior economic value. Implementation of comprehensive community-scale strategies achieved microclimate improvements, including peak temperature reductions of 2.9 °C ( 7 % ). These translated into a 27 % reduction in cooling demand and a 19 % decrease in overall energy consumption. To achieve the same energy reduction target, the community-scale approach required 17.9 % less capital investment offered a 21.2 % shorter payback period and demonstrated a 23.8 % better net present value compared to building scale interventions. The results provide a framework for sustainable urban development, demonstrating that community-scale retrofits offer superior cost-effectiveness and broader co-benefits compared to individual building retrofits targeting equivalent energy performance.