Abstract
Urban energy-district projects introduce outstanding technological innovation in buildings and energy systems increasing sustainability in city neighborhoods. Such projects generate additional co-benefits for the city beyond changes in physical elements and development of social and institutional relationships (e.g. local employment, environmental quality, public health, property values, innovation attitude, etc.). Since exceeding main declared goals or not always clearly foreseen in the early project phase, these co-benefits are often not properly understood and considered. However, only their explicit recognition will make possible their inclusion in the assessment of the whole project’s performance. From these considerations, this study faces the issue of engaging project partners in assessing co-benefits in order to consider a broad spectrum of relevant, positive effects in the evaluation process. Group knowledge and group thinking of this complex topic are investigated through the world café method, providing an atmosphere of trust and open discussions among participants. This empirical work lays the foundations to go beyond the mere economic measure as the sole criterion for assessing project effects, also including changes in end-user behavior and intangible assets.
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Notes
- 1.
Two facilitators did not follow our request to hand in reflections of the discussion as notes, and after it became clear that audio recordings were unusable.
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Acknowledgements
Authors would like to acknowledge the colleagues and the SINFONIA project partners involved in the World Cafè. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 609019. The European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained in this document, which is merely representing the author’s view.
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Bisello, A., Boczy, T., Balest, J. (2018). World Café Method to Engage Smart Energy-District Project Partners in Assessing Urban Co-benefits. In: Mondini, G., Fattinnanzi, E., Oppio, A., Bottero, M., Stanghellini, S. (eds) Integrated Evaluation for the Management of Contemporary Cities. SIEV 2016. Green Energy and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78271-3_41
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