Urban energy transitions begin at the scale closest to people’s lives—the neighbourhood. This keynote draws on UN-Habitat Urban Lab’s global experience in neighbourhood planning and the “My Neighbourhood” methodology to highlight how spatial design decisions—from layout and density to land use mix and mobility networks—directly impact energy demand, efficiency, and resilience. Through case studies from diverse urban contexts, the talk will demonstrate how integrated planning at the neighbourhood scale can reduce infrastructure needs, support passive energy strategies, and foster sustainable lifestyles. It argues that to achieve equitable, low-carbon cities, we must prioritise design approaches that embed energy efficiency into the very fabric of urban form.

 

The Urban Planning and Design Lab (Urban Lab) is an initiative from UN-Habitat to promptly respond to the requests of national and local governments to support sustainable urban development. The Urban Lab is the integrative facility of the Agency where innovative processes and partnerships are translated into tangible and transformative solutions to complex urban challenges. Throughout, the Urban Lab acts as a neutral broker, managing knowledge in complex stakeholder settings to resolve multi-sectoral, multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder challenges.

The Lab brings together a multidisciplinary team of urban planners, environmental, data-science, mobility, legal and financial experts, providing a holistic and proactive approach to sustainable urbanisation. Hence, the Lab captures the necessary thematic disciplines, experts, actors and stakeholders.

In this context, the Urban Lab applies an integrated approach to systemic and strategic planning to deliver transformative change for sustainable urbanisation and to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda.

Professor Debra Roberts is a scientist who has spent four decades working at the science-policy-practice interface at local and international levels. Prof. Roberts headed the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit and Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department in eThekwini Municipality (Durban, South Africa) between 1994 and 2024. She was elected as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Co-Chair of Working Group II for the sixth assessment cycle (2015–2023). Prof. Roberts has held several international advisory roles, for example advising: United Cities and Local Governments; ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability; Global Commission for SDG Urban Finance; and the WMO World Weather Research Programme. She was also a lead negotiator for the South African delegation involved in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. She is currently one of the experts working on UNFCCC’s Global Goal on Adaptation indicators. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and holds the Professor Willem Schermerhorn Chair in Open Science from a Majority World Perspective at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation at the University of Twente. She is President of the AXA Research Fund Scientific Board and Chair of the Board of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

Professor Nilay Shah is a leading expert in sustainable energy and industrial systems at Imperial, where he is a Professor of Process Systems Engineering and Co-Director of the School of Convergence Science for Sustainability. His research focuses on sustainable processes, carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen infrastructure and whole-system energy modeling, with a particular emphasis on optimising low-carbon industrial processes and sustainable cities to support the transition to net zero. He has played a key role in large-scale energy transition projects, advising government and industry on the integration of CCS, hydrogen and renewables. He is also a member of the UK Hydrogen Delivery Council, working alongside industry leaders to accelerate the deployment of clean hydrogen.