Towards more sustainable neighbourhoods: are good practices reproducible and extensible?

Several urban neighbourhoods built or retrofitted from the 1990s have become renowned for their sustainability and are often presented as good practices, as far as sustainable development and low energy architecture are concerned. Although these “sustainable neighbourhoods” receive a great deal of media coverage, they seem to stay “single” experiments and are rarely repeated in other territories or at larger scales. This paper first discusses the European context, which fostered the development of these pilot experiments. It then proposes a rereading of eight famous sustainable neighbourhoods in an analytic way that is more than descriptive to highlight good practices to repeat and weaknesses to avoid and question the reproducibility of these experiments. The settings grid, which describes the achievement conditions and some common characteristics of these urban projects, highlighted through this analysis, is compared with a Belgian dwelling project, and this comparison allows us to explain why it can be difficult to extend these concepts more widely. Finally, the paper proposes several guidelines to promote energy efficiency and sustainability at the urban scale in order to support the planning of more sustainable urban projects.