A Passive House District is a carefully planned neighbourhood where buildings, public spaces, and infrastructure are designed together to achieve a high standards of energy efficiency, comfort, and environmental responsibility. By applying Passive House at the district scale, the community dramatically reduces energy demand while providing healthy indoor environments and a high quality of life for residents. The result is a future-ready district that combines climate protection with everyday comfort.

The tool districtPH calculates energy balances for neighbourhoods, from smaller groups of buildings up to whole districts. Its par­tic­u­lar strength lies in the ana­lys­is of ret­ro­fits and de­vel­op­ment scen­ari­os for ex­ist­ing build­ings. Elec­tri­city and heat­ing net­works, re­new­able en­ergy, elec­tro­mo­bil­ity and pub­lic con­sumers are all taken in­to ac­count. Read more on PHI's website here
A report describing the methodology of districtPH and explaining an example application can be downloaded here.

Renovation Strategies assessed via District Energy Balance

The Bahnstadt district in Heidelberg, Germany is one of the largest sustainable urban development projects in Germany and the largest Passive House settlement worldwide at present. Find out more about Heidelberg-Bahnstadt in the following articels and report:

Passive House district Heidelberg-Bahnstadt in the eyes of its residents

Passive House City District Heidelberg-Bahnstadt - Experience and Evaluation

Monitoring energy consumption in the new district Bahnstadt in Heidelberg

Energy monitoring of residential buildings in the Passive House city district of Heidelberg-Bahnstadt

Passive House for municipalities

Built examples: Passive House and EnerPHit worldwide