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The transport sector accounts for around 30% of Europe’s final energy consumption. It is important to quantify the energy savings potential in technology, infrastructure, and planning to meet the EU’s decarbonisation goals by 2050. This study analyses the European transport sector in the context of traditional and energy-efficient urban development. The latter demonstrates a scenario where accessibility results from enhanced proximity to a destination rather than increased mobility, shifting mobility from roads and aviation towards the rail. This development is ensured by, among other things, investing heavily in urban and inter-urban transport systems and abstaining from building new freeways and airports. The results indicate that shifting towards an energy-efficient transport system is desirable and economically beneficial. The development of the European transport sector in the proposed trajectory significantly reduces annual final energy demand. The reduced road transport cost pays back the investment in new infrastructure for rail, bikes, and walkable urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It is widely recognised that the world is facing climate challenges that necessitate transitions towards more energy-efficient buildings. A key challenge is that visions of energy efficient buildings in policies often fail to become aligned with existing local practices. In order to overcome such a gap between policy visions and their implementation in practice specific forms of strategic work is needed, according to new transformative ideas in spatial planning. The aim of this paper is to characterize the transformative capacities of this kind of strategic work at the spatial scale of the town in order to assess how such activities engage with sustainable transitions. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to compare strategic work performed in transformative forms of spatial planning with the strategic work intended in strategic niche management, which represent a change-management process for enabling transitions. The study outlines the proactive spatial planning of a Danish local authority in order to illustrate how the strategic work performed in this kind of local development project represents a special form of niche management that is able to create room for innovation and challenge existing socio-technical regimes in the building sector, but still different to typical strategic niche management processes. Based on this empirical study, the paper challenges the narrow focus on niches around technology development processes in strategic niche management by pointing towards niche planning in local development projects as another relevant context for niche management. However, as discussed in the paper, this assumes a more strategic form of planning than is often practised today, where more emphasis is put on how planning can contribute to promoting sustainable transitions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Sustainable buildings have often been niche products, but in recent years a new approach has emerged in Denmark aimed at mainstreaming and normalizing this mode of construction and seeking to attract ordinary Danes through market conditions. The aim is to present an alternative conceptualization of sustainable buildings to the ecocommuni-ties' vision and to involve traditional building firms in their design and development. From a theoretical perspective, the mainstreaming of sustainable buildings can be seen either as an example of ecological modernization or techno-logical transition. The new conceptualization has implied a narrower approach to sustainability and a lack of social sustainability measures. While earlier paradigms of sustainable buildings emphasized themes such as community building, self-provisioning, local empowerment, and shared facilities, such objectives are largely absent in the new types of sustainable buildings. We question to what extent it is possible to design sustainable settlements without social sustainability. By viewing sustainable buildings as technological configurations, we argue that the multiactor approach, fragmentation of roles, and absent initiatives for social sustainability influence the buildings' environmental performance and should be important for the next generation of these structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]