Innovating sustainable building design and built environment processes

In this paper, we propose the concept of reliability as a way to introduce innovation in sustainable building design and built environment processes. For us reliability of agents and actions represents a new perspective for a radical restructuring of sustainability evaluation; in fact, reliability catches interactions between buildings and built environments, contextualizing design solutions and stimulating the regenerative capacities of a context. The paper highlights the much potential that reliability shows. It can be considered an operative tool to practice the regenerative approach; it can be a strong stimulus to innovate design activities; it can be a catalyst element of multiple stakeholders’ perspectives. In the attempt to address sustainability drawing on the regenerative approach, reliability stimulates the use of new conceptual tools, implies the application of new ways of acting, and challenges our knowledge and current technologies thus promoting innovation and experimentation.