Beyond City Average: Spatial Analysis to Support Energy-Saving Interventions in Urban Planning

Actions to handle the threats posed by climate change-related events and energy crisis are becoming increasingly needed. The transition from fossil fuels-based development to a more sustainable one has been prioritised in global agendas. The energy-saving issue is the foundation of the social and economic model of transformation for the near future and the turning point for sustainable, smart and energy resilient urbanisation. Thus, integrating energy-saving solutions with urban planning remains a challenge. This study aims at bridging this gap by investigating the relationship between urban characteristics and residential energy consumption using statistics and spatial analysis. Starting from deepening the results of a first GIS-based analysis applied to Naples (Italy) and the methodology behind them, this contribution aims at exploring how to support policy-makers in decision processes by implementing novel representation techniques. This study reveals how urban context dynamically impacts household energy usage, with a focus on green urban areas, by using Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) and depicting the non-stationary estimation coefficients derived from the investigation. This knowledge could enable local decision-makers to maximize the efficiency of energy-saving actions in building more resilient and sustainable cities by customizing them for particular metropolitan locations.