The aim of the proposed research on smart urban retrofitting is to identify the social and institutional conditions under which smart retrofitting of urban housing in China and the Netherlands may lead to decoupling of domestic energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. Apart from the use of smart technologies like smart meters and smart energy systems in energy retrofitting, the ?smartness? of urban retrofitting in this project also refers to the inclusion of end-user perspectives and the co-producing consumer. The project entails a comparative multiple case study of smart retrofitting projects in Amsterdam and Mianyang. Policy documents will be studied, and project initiators, local authorities, housing corporations, grid operators and utilities will be interrogated on the set up and governance of these projects, while changing energy practices of residents will be studied by means of interviews, observations and a series of consumer focus groups both in Amsterdam and in Mianyang. The energy practices that emerge as an implication of smart urban retrofitting will be central to this study, next to the identification of new social relations amongst and between householders and housing and energy providers. Results of the project will inform policy makers and practitioners in Amsterdam and Mianyang on the implications for consumers and providers of smart retrofitting projects in terms of new emerging energy practices and new relations between consumers and providers.

With an increasing global urbanization, demands on the livelihood of cities are rising swiftly. In the conventional urban growth, biodiversity is often constrained, separation of functions leads to inefficient resource use, impact of climate change becomes extreme and human health is increasingly endangered. Green infrastructure (GI, e.g. green roofs, parks) in cities may simultaneously supply multiple functions that contributes to solve these issues. The challenge is how to accommodate and harmonise these possibly synergising or competing functions of GI in current and future urban landscape. Here, transdisciplinary learning[14] will be used to co-create the planning and design of the multi-functioning of GI in cities. Building from our experiences in Xiamen, Breda and Nieuwegein, we will develop and evaluate such multi-functional designs for these cities. We hypothesize that learning among multiple disciplines and cities are the two keys to unlock the potential of multi-functioning of GI. In this research we aim at operationalizing this learning process via (1) co-creation of a GI planning and evaluation tool, MultiGreen, to stimulate and distil the transdisciplinary learning for multi-functioning of GI and (2) participatory-based application of MultiGreen in selected case cities to facilitate learning among stakeholders so as cities. We start with, but not limited to, integrating three main GI functions: the circular food provision, climate adaptation, and biodiversity restoration; different GI approaches like urban farm, green roofs or wadi are thus considered. Then, a GIS-based building stock model is connected to an agent-based model to analyse the potential of ecological and social-economic benefits for accommodating different GI approaches. At last, a geo-spatial module matching the GI provision of multi-functioning and local demands will be developed and applied via a participatory approach in different case cities. Thus MultiGreen will enable the future designs of multi-functional GI to maximize the livelihood cities.