Beyond the Built Environment as a Sustainable System: a New Approach to Modelling

This paper deals with the evaluation of sustainability as a theoretical, methodological and operational tool to support and improve learning on regenerative transformations of the built environment. In contrast with the scale-centred approach underlying the existing sustainability evaluation systems of buildings and urban areas, we propose i-UrBE (integrated-Urban Building Evaluation) an evaluation approach which draws on a socio-ecological interpretation of the built environment and is finalised to support a regenerative urban and building design. In our approach, the evaluation of the sustainability of a building or an urban plan is focused on reciprocity of interactions between human and non-human world, is carried out in a socio- ecological space that we define urban matrix and is based on few holistic indicators. These last are conceived as crucial tools reporting about what we define the reliability of an action, i.e. the ability of an action addressed to sustainability of buildings or an urban context to stimulate and transform into capacity the regenerative socio-ecological potential of a specific place. Moving our work from the theoretical to the operational level, in this paper, we describe the evolution of i-UrBE approach for evaluating/assessing the regenerative sustainability of built environment focusing on reciprocity and reliability as crucial keys for an integrated urban- building evaluation. The paper underlines the relevance of reliability assessment based on few holistic indicators. In our evaluation approach, reliability reports on reciprocity by highlighting the ‘co-creative’ qualities of a design action addressed to a building to stimulate regenerative socio-ecological relationships shaping the built environment. At the operational level, reciprocity and reliability help to: (i) deal with sustainability in a pragmatic way on qualities inherent in an integrated process of urban-building design; (ii) improve knowledge generation on sustainability by enabling actors to identify trends, navigate sustainable transformations and highlight uncertainties associated with their actions.