Towards sustainable transitions of peri-urban neighborhoods of detached houses

Peri-urban neighborhoods of detached houses are facing countless challenges related to the building stock’s low energy efficiency, to the current demographic transition reducing household size and increasing the proportion of elderlies, to their distant location combined with exclusive residential use and few public transportation services. Those challenges represent growing issues for the upcoming years, with regard to the role those neighborhoods have to play in contributing to the collective challenge of the energy transition and to the fact they would have to cope with eventual future crisis. Hence the research investigates the transition potential of existing peri-urban neighborhoods of detaches houses by 2050, in Switzerland. Through a more focused approach, the paper, complemented with a poster, aims at highlighting how future evolutions might affect the overall sustainability of those residential areas. To do so, it focuses on the multicriteria assessment of five scenarios envisioned for peri-urban neighborhoods of detached houses and applied in six Swiss case-studies by 2050. The scenarios Caducity and Exclusivity follow business as usual trends. The scenario Opportunity investigates the effects of soft-densification processes, and Urbanity and Mutuality offer new perspectives towards densification or landscape integration. A multicriteria comparison relies on results of the systematic assessment of the neighborhoods’ environmental quality, energy efficiency, economic viability and social diversity in 2050 and of the scenario’s feasibility. It innovates by relying on a spatiotemporal assessment methodology developed at neighborhood scale. Altogether it provides a qualitative decision-making support by identifying strengths and weaknesses of each scenarios. The overall average results show that Urbanity, which concentrates its actions on a few plots, presents the best-balanced performances among all criteria. All the other scenarios are favorable to one or two criteria only. Besides providing decision-making support, this assessment also sets a framework to reorient public policies towards more resilient peri-urban residential neighborhoods.