Citizen4PED

Citizens4PED investigated how four contrasted existing neighbourhoods—La Roue (Anderlecht/Brussels), USquare (Brussels), Kahlenbergerdorf (Vienna) and San Paolo (Bari)—can move toward becoming Positive Energy Districts (PEDs): urban areas balancing annual energy demand with local renewable production while protecting affordability, social inclusion and heritage. Rather than designing PEDs on greenfield sites, the project tackled the hard case: retrofitting old buildings in socially diverse districts. The work combined three strands: (1) techno-economic modelling of district heating, heat pumps, PV, storage and energy-management systems, assessed via multi-objective Pareto optimisation and hydraulic simulation (Arteria platform); (2) institutional and stakeholder analysis using the Mitchell-Agle-Wood typology, an Actor Linkage Matrix and a per-city "Policy Canvas"; and (3) a social-science strand introducing sufficiency—that "enough" matters as much as efficiency—and energy commons. Three findings emerged. First, collective solutions (district heating with heat pumps, campus energy hubs, Renewable Energy Communities) beat individual ones on cost and carbon in all four Labs, yet voluntary renovation stalls below 10% uptake even with 80% subsidy. Second, fully "autonomous" PEDs are unrealistic for dense existing areas—only the USquare campus could near neutrality by 2040; the others need virtual renewable imports. Third, sufficiency is invisible to standard tools (nPro, Hysopt), which lock comfort at 20 °C.