Sustainability in the Built Environment: Integrating Scales of Action and Evaluation

Urban sustainability is still far from being reached. This situation testifies the difficulties to plan, design, implement and manage sustainable development processes in an integrative perspective. There are several cognitive, political and technological challenges to be faced in order to change this situation and make sustainabilisation process of the city more effective. In this paper we focus on issues concerning our ability to learn to integrate social, economic and environmental aspects through evaluation of sustainability in the city. To oppose the inconsistency of action shown by the weak results we have obtained from our investments in sustainable development during last decades, this paper argues that we need to think about sustainability of the built environment and its evaluation taking into account spatial issues, usually underestimated or assimilated to a problem of scale in the current evaluation frameworks. Following the results obtained in relation to the construction of an integrated urban-building evaluation framework, the paper underlines that if approached as spatially sensitive, evaluation of sustainability carried out at any scale would be aimed at stimulating the regenerative capacity of places.