Clean Energy Urban Design: The Energy Proforma in Practice and Policy offers a new way of understanding urban energy consumption in fast growing China by asking a simple question: How does the design of neighborhoods affect energy consumption? Four years of research―including interviews of 4,500 families and statistical modeling of their energy usage―led MIT researchers Dennis Frenchman and Chris Zegras to conclude that people living in better-designed neighborhoods will consume less energy in their daily patterns of life. Frenchman and Zegras take their findings a step further by making the results of their work accessible to the public through the online Energy Proforma © [http://energyproforma.mit.edu] a tool that allows designers, policymakers and the rest of us to rapidly assess the comprehensive energy performance of a neighborhood while it is being designed (or after it is built).
The Proforma provides the basis for design and policy recommendations included in the book, as well as illustrative neighborhood designs developed using the Proforma in the test city of Jinan, China. Clean Energy Urban Design: The Energy Proforma in Practice and Policy is a visionary yet highly practical approach to developing more sustainable low-carbon cities, one neighborhood at a time.