This book explores energy consumption and thermal comfort in the social housing sector in the South-eastern Mediterranean basin. This book presents a novel methodological framework for the optimisation of post-war social housing developments in the South-eastern Mediterranean climate. The authors draw on semi-structured interviews to present evidence on in-situ thermal sensation and provide the results of walk-through and walk-in thermographic surveys to highlight building fabric performance and highlight anomalies in the building envelopes. The authors go on to show how this data-informed retrofit design solution can be applied to reduce household energy consumption, increase awareness of domestic energy use and inform effective policy making decisions in energy use in the South-eastern Mediterranean basin, including the development of Energy Performance Certificate schemes. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy policy, energy efficiency and planning. It will also assist architects, building engineers and other practitioners in closing the gap between the current understanding and the actual performance of existing residential building stocks in the South-eastern Mediterranean basin.

This book investigates energy use and measures to improve the energy efficiency of public housing, using post-war social housing development estates in Cyprus as its example. On this Mediterranean island, which experiences hot and humid temperatures throughout the year, residential buildings need to adapt to the climate to improve the thermal comfort of their occupants. The book assesses the domestic energy use of inefficiently built residential tower blocks and their occupants' thermal comfort by considering the significant impact of overheating risks on energy consumption and occupants' thermal comfort and well-being, with the intention of evaluating the current energy performance of base-case representative residential tower blocks (RTBs). In particular, considering the cooling energy demand in the summer, using Famagusta, Cyprus as a case study. It seeks to identify the impact of occupancy patterns and habitual adaptive behaviour of households on home energy performance in order to provide bases for the information needed to calibrate building energy performance of targeted households.