Local operativeness within global strategy for managing sustainable construction

When facing the issue of sustainability in any field, the problem of considering the local as well the global scale of thinking and acting significantly arises, and of course this is also true in the building and construction field. This invites reasoning in terms of the approach to be used, and this paper proposes to use a two-level approach, facing the local with the global in mind, thus guaranteeing operativeness required for acting at the local scale within a strategy necessary for contributing to the global scale. The two main characteristics of the approach, which are considered more productive in terms of sustainability, are those of being holistic, to respect the complexity of real situations, and of a learning-by-doing type, to mature the right expertise for including all the actors and necessary actions in the process. The two levels, operative and strategic, of such an approach are then analyzed through three case studies concerning the existing building stock in a city, and considering to retrofit it in a sustainable way in order to effectively contribute to sustainability of the built environment. The final outcome of the study presented in the paper, is to have brought to light some features of a sustainable process for managing existing buildings and the built environment, which go beyond technical solutions and local applications.