Towards a holistic approach for the urban environment and its impact on energy utilisation in buildings: the ATREUS project.

Enhanced urbanisation and its impact on the urban climate have a significant impact on the energy behaviour of buildings. Rising standards in indoor environmental quality lead to higher energy consumption values for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning purposes. ATREUS is a research and training network launched recently aiming to cover some of these aspects to enable a better understanding of the phenomena as well as providing high quality training for young European researchers. Having completed one year of work, some indicative results of the approach used within ATREUS have already produced both methodological approaches and combinatorial case studies; an example of the latter, based on the Thessaloniki experiment and the results produced by an extended field survey, will be discussed.