Abstract

Contemporary architects and urban planners are facing steadily increasing challenges. The growing problems around environmental issues, shrinking natural resources and climate action are just some of them. Currently, planning should also include balancing with all the aspects of sustainable development such as not only the environmental issues, but also social and economic ones. How to meet them in the era of energy transition and the transfer of physical reality to virtual one? Some of the European Union countries began to successively implement solutions related to the optimization and collection of data on energy consumption, in the form of smart meters, the first step to create smart houses and smart cities. The question is whether planners are ready for this shift. In this situation, two divergent worldviews are confronted: contemporary architects and planners versus industry engineers and programmers responsible for the technological implementation of energy- -independent buildings and cities. The first group mostly concerns balanced and harmonious principles of shaping space in the pursuit of satisfying functional, aesthetic, socio-economic and environmental aspects. The approach of second group is based solely on parameters, calculations, energy characteristics and hard indisputable data, which is represented by industry engineers. This raises the risk of utopian attempts to develop a fixed idea, which could be applied everywhere in energy and planning matters - very tempting for industry engineers and at the same time extremely dangerous for shaping the space we live in. Energy efficiency and independency is namely not shaped by independent buildings and objects. When talking about spatial energy efficiency, often underestimated, comprehensive urban aspects related to mobility, location and several other factors should be considered. Therefore, the cooperation of architects, urban planners with industry engineers dealing with energy issues is indispensable to create a comprehensive spatial energy efficiency, not limited only to solids of individual objects.

Authors (2)