Accomplishments and Objectives

This is the second volume of the Young Cities Research Papers series presenting the scientific results from the mutual Iranian-German research project “Young Cities—Urban Energy Efficiency. Developing Energy- Efficient Urban Fabric in the Tehran-Karaj Region”. The project is funded for the German side by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF. From the Iranian side, the Building and Housing Research Center BHRC and the New Towns Development Corporation NTDC as the main project partners are both affiliated to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development MHUD.The Young Cities Research Papers shall disseminate the scientific results gained from the Young Cities project and the related PhD, post doctoral and senior expert research. The first two volumes are published following the completion of the first of the overall project’s pilot project, i.e. the New Quality pilot project buildings in Hashtgerd New Town. Hashtgerd New Town, 65 km to the west of Tehran and 30 km to the west of Karaj in the Alborz Province in Iran, forms the spatial focus of the Young Cities project. It is the place of intervention and for testing and trying the solutions and concepts developed for energy-efficient and sustainable urban design and planning, infrastructure provision, and object planning by the Iranian and German project partners. The solutions and concepts shall, however, be applicable and transferable to other places in the Tehran-Karaj region as well as in Iran and in the Middle East North Africa region MENA.The New Quality buildings as the first of the pilot projects to be completed are residential buildings. It was planned jointly by the Iranian and German partners from a typical Iranian residential building scheme widely to be found in the region’s new settlements and New Towns and adapted by small scale interventions for economical improvements regarding building quality, construction layout, and energy-efficiency. The pilot project has been erected by the Housing Investment Company hic, Tehran, under supervision of BHRC and TU Berlin including an on-site vocational training workshop for construction site staff aiming at improved building quality and use of the new materials and construction technologies introduced. The erection of the New Quality pilot project, now, is completed. The pilot project, however, goes on by the seamless start of monitoring of the buildings performance during use regarding energy consumption, water consumption and building quality. The results from the monitoring will be fed into the development of the other pilot projects, into the tested and tried concepts and solutions to be presented and disseminated as the project’s output, and into the project evaluation assessing the effects from the project. The present second volume is to introduce the overall Young Cities project with its accomplishments up to August 2010. It is divided into four main parts on the background of the project, its objectives and methodological approach, the results and accomplishments reached so far, and an outlook on the future progress of the project. The accomplishments form the main part and the focus of the volume since the series is devoted primarily to the results from the project. However, as the first volume in English language, the Young Cities project is also introduced with respect to some background information and primarily to its objectives and methodology forming the introduction into the whole series as is the first volume for Farsi language readers.