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The urban renewal process in neighbourhoods with well-rooted communities often reveals the ties between people and spaces, and highlights the inextricable links between social and physical structures. The residents of three neighbour-hoods in the city of Barcelona–Trinitat Nova, Plus Ultra and Vallcarca–have endured and fought against the threat of radical urban renewals planned by the municipal authorities for decades, and their efforts have only recently been rewarded with the acceptance of their demands by local administrations. In this period, residents organized themselves to defend their vision of the place against official plans, a vision which was a collective construction of personal memories and historical evidences. In the PROHABIT research project, we have undertaken an interdisciplinary study, involving architects-planners and social and environmental psychologists, to understand the process of construction of a sense of community and place identity in three neighbourhoods. The study has highlighted the need to overcome the divisions between social sciences and design disciplines, between the real world of experience and the abstract world of design thinking. In this regard, the work conducted in this project offers some insights into the need to create a holistic understanding of today's urban environment, and how architects and planners need to develop skills and methods to enable them to form part of the open and participatory planning systems which our contemporary urban environments demand.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the most appropriate multidisciplinary data sources related with energy optimization decision support as well as the related methodologies, tools and techniques for data capturing and processing for each of them.

A review is conducted on the state-of-play of decision support systems for energy optimization, focussing on the municipal sector, followed by an identification of the most appropriate multidisciplinary data sources related with energy optimization decision support. An innovative methodology is outlined to integrate semantically modeled data from multiple sources, to assist city authorities in energy management.

City authorities need to lead relevant actions toward energy-efficient neighborhoods. Although there are more and more energy and other related data available at the city level, there are no established methods and tools integrating and analyzing them in a smart way, with the purpose to support the decision-making process on energy use optimization.

A novel multidimensional approach is proposed, using semantic technologies to integrate data from multiple sources, to assist city authorities to produce short-term energy plans in an integrated, transparent and comprehensive way.

This paper presents the first estimates of Spanish infrastructure stock and investment for the period 1845–1935. Several sources and techniques have been used in the estimation, and the new series are reasonably reliable to the standards of historical statistics. Two distinct periods may be distinguished in the series: the years before 1895 (characterized by the prominence of railroads) and the period 1895–1935 (when most investment was addressed to other assets). The new series allow a preliminary comparison of the Spanish infrastructure endowment with that of the most advanced countries, showing a gradual process of convergence before 1936.