Sustainability of the built environment: opening new frontiers for evaluation

Methods and systems for evaluating building and urban sustainability have become useful tools for supporting designing and planning of the built environment. Despite their relevance in implementing sustainable development, a new challenge is to overcome their limitations inhibiting a more effective and lasting sustainability. The paper presents a research working on the absence of spatial integration in existing evaluation systems, and advances a novel approach to re-interpret sustainability evaluation on conceptual, methodological and operational level. Key elements are: integrating the building and urban scales of sustainability evaluation by modelling the built environment as a socio-ecological system; re-framing sustainable building design as a spatial practice able to activate regenerative capacities of a place. Opening new frontiers for evaluation, this approach supports learning in designing and planning processes and helps decision-making actors to build creative solutions.