In this blog post, we would like to introduce you to the „Coop4PEDs – Cooperatives for Positive Energy Districts“ research project as part of the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) programme. Tobias Speckner from realitylab briefly presents the project in this video:
The project Coop4PEDs aims to research and develop the role and potential of cooperatives as central actors in implementing coordinated decarbonisation strategies and transforming urban neighbourhoods into Positive Energy Districts (PEDs).
It addresses the systemic organisational, financial, and legal challenges faced by cities, building owners, and residents when implementing PEDs in existing built environments. While current solutions in cities often remain fragmented and citizen-led initiatives frequently encounter regulatory barriers, Coop4PEDs develops an integrated approach to overcome these obstacles.
This innovative approach introduces cooperatives as drivers of the urban energy transition by integrating the sectors of heat, power, mobility, and shared services into cooperative-led PED models. Moving beyond models focused solely on technical infrastructure, Coop4PEDs builds on the concept of „energy commons“. It develops new models for collective governance and shared resource management, empowering residents to produce and share sustainable resources according to their own needs rather than relying on top-down solutions.
Coop4PEDs seeks to provide solutions to pressing urban challenges, including climate change, energy poverty, and the often-missing social acceptance for energetic modernisations. By joining cooperative PED structures, residents collectively reduce their CO2 emissions, end their dependency on fossil fuels, and strengthen social cohesion and local resilience. Collaboration within the organisational and legal framework of a cooperative thus becomes a key factor for participation in transformative processes.
The concepts and models developed throughout the project will be validated in three Urban Living Labs with diverse framework conditions: Vienna (Austria), Malmö (Sweden), and Surbo (Italy). In collaboration with citizens, municipalities, and research institutions, scalable solutions will be tested, ranging from thermal refurbishment of post-war housing to citizen-led renewable energy communities. Based on these real-world experiences, the Coop4PEDs team aims to provide transferable planning toolsets and policy recommendations to promote the cooperative PED model at both national and European levels.
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In the next blog post we will introcude the international and transdisciplinary consortium of the Coop4PEDs project.. so stay tuned
Coop4PEDs is funded by FFG (Austria), the Swedish Energy Agency and the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca MUR (Italy) under the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) Partnership, which has been co-funded by the European Commission.
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