The Tito Maccio Plauto School, which was part of the SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE project, is located in Cesena in north-east Italy, close to the Adriatic Sea. The school, built in the 1960s, is an L-shaped building on three levels with a basement, part of which is used for music labs and the canteen. It has classrooms, labs, an administration area and a music hall, as well as a gym adjacent to the main building. The building hosts about 400 pupils and 40 to 50 teachers and caretakers.

The aim of the SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE project was to design, demonstrate, evaluate and communicate shining examples of how to achieve the high-performance building of the future with a focus on school buildings. One of the project’s demonstration sites was the Solitude-Gymnasium, which is located in the north-west of Stuttgart, the capital of the federal state Baden-Württemberg (south-western Germany).

Tepebaşı is a municipality located in Eskişehir in the mid-western side of Anatolia with a population of 320 000. Yaşamköyü is a district of approximately 30 000 m2 with a built area of just under 10 000 m2. The area was built on 2007 by TOKI, the governmental organisation responsible for mass housing in Turkey. Although relatively newly built, similar to most buildings built before the Energy Efficiency Law that came into force recently, the district building stock consists of inefficiently constructed buildings in energy consumption terms.

Valladolid is the capital of the autonomous region of Castile and Leon in the north-west part of Spain, and with a population of 307 052 people it is the biggest city in the region. The demonstration site of the REMOURBAN project in Valladolid covers the FASA district, which has a surface of 3.5 km2 and is part of the Delicias neighbourhood, located in the south-east of Valladolid. The district was designed and built at the beginning of the 1960s for workers of the FASA company.

The area around Sneinton Road in Nottingham is considered to be the most appropriate for the development of the REMOURBAN demo site in the United Kingdom. The site is nearby the existing district heating and the pipeline reaches Bio City, situated very close to Sneinton Road. There is substantial Nottingham City Council housing in the area that needs upgrading to a much more energy-efficient state. Near the site is one of the famous city landmarks – George Green’s Windmill – and the science centre.

The city of Helsingborg had adopted an ambitious climate action plan by which the city had already achieved 88 % CO2 emissions reductions (compared with the 1997 level) and a less than 20 % share of fossil fuel, the final goal being carbon neutrality, or even exporting carbon-neutral energy to neighbouring areas. With this aim, the NEXT-BUILDINGS project realised very low-energy buildings as the first phase of a huge and very ambitious 311 000 m2 ecodistrict development.

Houthaven used to be a harbour and timber handling area, situated close to Amsterdam city centre, where many wood factories and related companies were located. After a long history of industrial activities, Houthaven is being transformed into a residential area. In total, seven islands are under development, providing space for 2 200 dwellings, 70 houseboats and 50 000 m2 facilities. In the NEXT-BUILDINGS project, 30 000 m2 of net zero-energy buildings were realised within Houthaven in the area named Blok 0.

The goal of the demonstration project was to build a 12 300 m2 zero-energy building in the Lyon-Confluence area in Lyon, France. The public company in charge of the urban project had had previous experience with its involvement in a demonstration project for the construction of the first buildings of this major urban regeneration project (CONCERTO Renaissance project). Given that the first demo project has had a significant impact on the other buildings constructed in that area, the public company wanted to build a new demonstration building with improved energy-efficient targets.

The objective of the EE-HIGHRISE project was to demonstrate and validate new technologies, concepts, and systems in order to test and assess the technological and economic feasibility of innovative energy solutions for high-rise buildings. The project used the Eco Silver House in Ljubljana (Slovenia) as a demonstration site.

The Turkish demonstration site of NEED4B is on the Özyeğin  University campus, located in Nisantepe, Istanbul, north-west Turkey. The Nisantepe region is a newly developed residential site situated very close to the residential and financial region of Ümraniye. The building in focus is in part of the campus buildings that host the School of Languages (ScOLa). The total building area is 17 756 m2 spread across seven levels.