University campuses as small-scale models of cities: Quantitative assessment of a low carbon transition path

The energy efficiency interventions and rehabilitation actions regarding university campuses are characterizedby an emblematic impact, representing significant examples of good practices that a given community couldadopt, even at the city level.Starting from the idea that campuses may be regarded as small scale models of cities, a quantitative methodfor estimating to which extent the adoption of a given set of interventions by a municipality could contribute tomake such city close to a nearly zero energy profile is proposed.To accomplish this task, the study considers the low carbon transition path of the campus of the University ofPalermo and applies a simple method that, implementing an idea firstly developed by Yoshida et al. (2017),provides a rapid and effective graphical representation of the level of the success reached by the campus in termsof accomplishment of the nearly zero energy targets.The analysis of the transferability of such method to cities has shown that it can also be easily adopted by acity's administration and can be used for assessing the effectiveness of actions typically belonging to a city'senergy policy, such as the public procurement and the waste management, apart from the actions regarding thepublic transportation system and the energy efficiency of the public building stock.