The ECO-Life demonstration site in Belgium is in Kortrijk, a city located in the Flemish province of West Flanders. The wider municipality comprises the city of Kortrijk and the seven surrounding towns with a total of 74 700 inhabitants, which makes it the seventh largest city in the Flemish region.
Trondheim is a city and municipality in Sør-Trøndelag county situated by the Trondheim fjord. With a population of 173,486 it is the third most populous municipality and city in the country. This community has a very strong environmental engagement with strong research. It has an overachieving strategy with several goals that concerns energy and energy related issues; the first aim is that the municipality should contain the Kyoto-target for Norway within themselves.
Tudela is a community with around 35,000 inhabitants to the south of Pamplona in the region of Navarra, Spain. Tudela will put intelligent energy management at the centre of its sustainability plan. The community of Navarra occupies an important position in the field of renewable energies, and as such, has been since 2001 the official headquarters of the National Centre for Renewable Energies (CENER). A national training centre for renewable energy is also located in the region. Both of these institutions are lending their expertise to the community.
Viladecans with 64,277 inhabitants is part of the complex regional web that is the metropolitan area ov Barcelona. It is a coastal community, 12 km from Barcelona. It has seen fast population growth, with a number of inhabitants moving from other parts of Spain, and planning and development in the district has been unstructured. Households in the area have lower income and higher unemployment than the regional average.
Milton Keynes already has a reputation in the UK as an energy pioneer. Designated in the 1960’s as a planned new town, it is located close to London.
The Concerto-Project will comprise 7 blocks totalling 650 dwellings, with retail and community facilities at ground floor on main frontages. All in all, nearly 3,830 people will directly benefit from the project in Milton-Keynes. Because of renewable energy supply and energy savings, the buildings they live in will produce just half the CO2 that would be produced by equivalent dwellings without the measures.
Almere is a young municipality. Its first house was completed only in 1976. It is sited on the reclaimed territory of Flevoland.
The Almere districts of Noorderplassen West and Columbuskwartier were thus obvious candidates for actions under the CONCERTO project. In these areas, 2,000 eco-homes are being built, along with commercial and public buildings. Specific innovations with these developments include the integration of renewable energy sources and the application of energy efficiency measures in city planning, area development, public tendering, architecture and building.
The act2 project in Nantes was designed in 2003 as an integrated approach to enrich the local energy policy stated in the local Climate and Energy action plans led by Nantes Métropole Urban Community.
It also aims at improving practices of a complete chain of actors involved in the construction process: from decision makers to citizens, passing by building companies.
In this respect, activities to be implemented focus on three main areas:
1 – Demonstration
One of the first principles of sustainable living is to make the best use of the resources that are closest at hand. Genève is putting this principle into practice using a resource that is right at its doorstep: the water of Lake Genève. The lake´s water – nearly 90 km3 in volume – has a conveniently constant temperature of eight degrees Celsius on the ground. This makes the water an ideal source of energy for heating and cooling buildings of Switzerland´s second largest city.
The Capital of Budapest is divided into 22 districts. One of the biggest local governments is the district called Óbuda – Békásmegyer. It has 127.000 inhabitants and is the 6th biggest municipality of Hungary. The City Council of Óbuda approved a development plan for the district which focuses on the energy efficient reconstruction of the building blocks as main duty. In total there are 33,981 flats built with an industrial prefabricated concrete system. These flats are in a very bad condition concerning the windows, walls, roof insulation and the efficiency of the central heating system.
