Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40

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Environmental Impact Assessment Review

journalhomepage:www.elsevier.com/locate/eiar

Beyond the buildingcentric approach: A vision for an integrated evaluation of

sustainable buildings
Emilia Conte a, , Valeria Monno b
a
Dipartimento di Architettura e Urbanistica, Politecnico di Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70125 Bari, Italy
b
Dipartimento di Ingegneria delle Acque e Chimica, Politecnico di Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70125 Bari, Italy

article info abstract

Article history: The available sustainable building evaluation systems have produced a new environmental design paradigm. However, there
Received 12 August 2011 is an increasing need to overcome the buildingcentric approach of these systems, in order to further exploit their innovate
Received in revised form 2 November 2011 potential for sustainable building practices. The paper takes this challenge by developing a cross-scale evaluation approach
Accepted 10 December 2011 Available online
focusing on the reliability of sustainable building design solu-tions for the context in which the building is situated. An
xxxx
integrated building–urban evaluation model is pro-posed based on the urban matrix, which is a conceptualisation of the built
environment as a social–ecological system. The model aims at evaluating the sustainability of a building considering it as an
Keywords:
Sustainable building active entity contrib-uting to the resilience of the urban matrix. Few holistic performance indicators are used for evaluating
Holistic performance indicators such contribution, so expressing the building reliability. The discussion on the efficacy of the model shows that it works as a
Urban matrix heuristic tool, supporting the acquisition of a better insight into the complexity which charac-terises the relationships between
Integrated building–urban evaluation the building and the built environment sustainability. Shading new lights on the meaning of sustainable buildings, the model
Reliability can play a positive role in innovating sustainable building design practices, thus complementing current evaluation systems.

© 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Sustainable building evaluation is seen as an essential tool to stim-ulate an
open dialogue and learning process on crucial topics con-cerning the
innovation of building design and practices. Although the available
sustainable building evaluation systems have favoured the emergence of a
new environmental building design paradigm (Mateus and Bragança, 2011),
their potential of innovating building practices in a sustainable way remains a
contested field (Cole, 2005) and hampered by several limitations (Ding,
2008). These systems do not appropriately consider and integrate the multiple
dimensions of sustainability. They are overwhelmed by a prevailing
environmental perspective, technological concerns, and certificatory rather
than ex-plorative and experimental purposes (Cole, 2005; Ding, 2008; Marsh
et al., 2010).
their economic convenience and viability (Miller et al., 2009). For ex-ample,
sustainable buildings certified by means of the many environ-mental
assessment systems, are assumed as necessarily producing an undisputable
increase of the sustainability of the built environment whether this last is
considered at the neighbourhood, urban and global level.
It could be said, paraphrasing Richardson and Cashmore (2011), that the
limitations of current evaluation systems of sustainable buildings risk
encouraging the belief that the change towards sustain-able building practices
can be achieved “by working at the margins”. Instead of inducing to reflect on
the complexity of building–urban re-lationships as a necessary way to trigger
a more radical change to-wards the sustainability, they tend to encourage the
innovation of sustainable building practices in terms of technological
improve-ments addressing urgent environmental problems.

These limitations, on the one hand, have contributed to diffuse a so strong
idea of the innovation of sustainable building practices as an assemblage of
eco-technologies, that we often confuse green with sustainable buildings
(Straube, 2006). On the other hand, they have favoured an instrumental use of
evaluation as a tool of assess-ment mainly aimed at justifying the
sustainability of the available market driven building design choices and
solutions on the base of
However, these limitations can be treated as pitfalls having the potential to
open up a possible path towards the construction of new evaluation
approaches. Following this line of reasoning, the paper argues that sustainable
building evaluation could exploit its po-tential of innovation of building
practices by developing cross-scale approaches focusing on the ‘reliability’ of
sustainable building design solutions for the social–ecological relationships
characterising the context in which the building is situated.

Specifically the paper proposes a model which is intended to carry out a

Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 080 5963466; fax: +39 080 5963348. E-mail more integrated building–urban evaluation taking into account the complex
addresses: conte@poliba.it (E. Conte), vmonno@poliba.it (V. Monno). social–ecological interactions between buildings, the

0195-9255/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eiar.2011.12.003
32 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40
urban space and the environment. The model proposed is not intended to
substitute the existing systems but rather to complement them, by offering a
heuristic framework having the potential of chal-lenging well-established
conceptions and solutions of the sustainabil-ity of buildings and improving
learning of relationships between a building and the urban context in which it
is situated.
This paper is structured into three parts. Rather than critically reviewing
existing environmental assessment tools for buildings whose comparison is
difficult, if not impossible (Haapio and Viitaniemi, 2008), in the first part, the
paper highlights the value but also some crucial pitfalls of these systems weak
ability in evaluat-ing the sustainability of an individual building as
contributing to sus-tainability of the urban context in which it is localised.
The discussion developed in Sections 2 and 3 highlights the main features
of what we define the dominant current buildingcentric ap-proach used for
evaluating the sustainability of building perfor-mances in current assessment
systems. Consequently, we single out some crucial substantive problems to
overcome in order to carry out an integrated building–urban evaluation
approach aiming at in-novating sustainable building practices.
In the second part of the paper, at first in Sections 4.1 we specifi-cally
focus on two crucial issues in order to construct the integrated evaluation
approach able to link the building under assessment to the urban context.
These issues are related to the need of an evalua-tion approach which is based
on a conceptual model of the social– ecological complexity of the built
environment rather than on a specific interpretation of sustainability; and the
need to evaluate the interrelated effects of sustainable buildings on the urban
con-text through few holistic indicators. In Section 4.2, we then propose to
base the integrated building–urban evaluation approach on the urban matrix,
that is a conceptual model of the built environment. After explaining the
meaning and content of holistic performance indicators in relation to the
urban matrix, some criteria are sketched to orient their construction. In
Section 4.3, we translate the building– urban evaluation approach into an
operative evaluation framework.
The third part of the paper discusses limits and potentialities of the
evaluation model proposed. The paper concludes by arguing that, even in this
early stage of its development, the integrated build-ing–urban approach can
complement the existing evaluation systems by working as an open and
heuristic framework having the potential of shading new lights on both the
meaning of sustainable buildings and the possibilities of innovating building
practices. The evaluation model induces to look for new indicators more
attuned to face an in-tegrated building–urban evaluation forcing to face
limitations under-lying the currently available evaluation systems. The use of
few holistic performance indicators for grasping the sustainability of the
relationships between buildings and the built environment is crucial at this
purpose, even though further research is needed to test their potentials.
2. The buildingcentric approach: problems and challenges
For a long period, the innovation of building practices towards
sustainability has evolved from a continuous confrontation and colli-sion
among different actors' interests, values and their contradictory and
conflicting certainties concerning both the idea of sustainability and
technological innovation (Guy and Farmer, 2001). The emer-gence of a
multiplicity of sustainable building assessment systems and tools is one of the
results of such an intense and often contested dialogue.
At present, there are many assessment systems and tools, and more are
being developed despite the fact that a trend for homogeni-sation is emerging.
This situation has been determined by the need to have the tool adapted to the
country which uses it, therefore some countries use national interpretation of
pioneering systems, others develop and are developing their own systems.
Just to name some
of more known and reported systems, in Europe there are: BREEAM
(Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method), the
progenitor system developed in UK; HQE (Haute Qualité Environne-mentale)
in France; DGNB (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen); and
SBTool (Sustainable Building Tool) a framework developed by iiSBE
(International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment) and locally
interpreted by different countries. Over Europe, there are: LEED (Leadership
in Energy and Environment Design) developed in USA; CASBEE
(Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environ-ment Efficiency) in
Japan; GreenStar in Australia; HK-BEAM (Hong Kong Building
Environmental Assessment Method) in Hong Kong; and again national
interpretations of SBTool. Usually, the most popular are: BREEAM, mostly
used in UK but also interpreted in other national contexts mainly within
Europe; LEED, mostly used in USA but also inter-preted in other countries in
America, Asia, and Europe; and SBTool, used all over the world in its
different local interpretations, as written above. All these systems are
continuously up-dated both in content and for dif-ferent kind of applications.
The multiplicity and complexity of these systems makes impossible a
critical analysis of each of them. However, through the years, these systems
have shown their enormous usefulness; they have contributed to: increase the
environmental awareness among the actors of the building process as well as
users of buildings; share criteria and objec-tives of sustainability among
professionals, for which these systems are a method and framework of
reference for testing projects; dissemi-nate best practices; stimulate laws and
policies implementation and in-centives; and improve the market demand and
supply (Reed et al., 2011). In this sense we can recognise that the use of
assessment sys-tems is increasingly promoting sustainable building design
(Mateus and Bragança, 2011) and consequently practices.
Notwithstanding their positive value in addressing building prac-tices
towards sustainability, these systems also present limits to-wards the
innovation of sustainable practices. We argue that these limits can be
considered a consequence of what we define a building-centric approach. In
fact, although evaluation systems are different, they share an approach
characterised by some common elements: the evaluation is focused more on
the sustainability of the product (the building); the sustainability of a building
is mainly interpreted from the environmental perspective which considers a
building sus-tainable if it is built or renovated, and operates, in an
ecologically ori-ented way by reducing environmental impacts and pressure;
the contribution of buildings to a sustainable development is assessed basing
on the building performance (Burnett, 2007). In assessing sus-tainable
buildings through the buildingcentric approach what really matters is the
sustainable functioning of the individual buildings, reflecting a conception of
the building as a consumer of resources and energy rather than as a producer
of sustainability at different spa-tial scales.
In such a perspective, the technological content of a building risks
emerging as the most important key factor towards sustainability. Following
the more recent consciousness of a necessary and immedi-ate consistent
reduction of the enormous contribution of buildings to climate change and
natural resources depletion (Omer, 2008a) differ-ent evaluation frameworks,
systems and tools have tended to privi-lege a few, specific aspects of the
evaluation, such as energy and environmental assessment. This trend has
implied a strong refocalisa-tion on innovation of sustainable building
practices as being mainly determined by eco-technologies.
Surely ecological design criteria and reduced flows of materials and
energy are crucial factors to make the building an active subject in
contributing to urban sustainability, but the focus is on the individ-ual
sustainable building, as if each building were isolated from other buildings,
infrastructures and the many other physical and non-physical factors
characterising a specific built environment, while on the contrary it is
essential to consider their interrelated wholeness (Reed, 2007).
 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40
Using the buildingcentric approach in assessing sustainable build-ings, we
can compare different building performances in relation to a specific built
environment, and evaluate a sort of sustainability level of an individual
building, but we are not able to evaluate the building contribution to the
sustainability of the context in which it is situated (Ding, 2008). This problem
is also considered a consequence of the modest knowledge we have on the
ecological relationships that link urban and natural systems and a modest
conceptualisation of both sustainability (Pope et al., 2004) and sustainable
assessment (Lawrence, 1997). In particular, the absence of a comprehensive
theory of the built environment considering the complex relationships be-
tween buildings, the urban space and the environmental systems (Moffatt and
Kohler, 2008), prevents the existing assessment sys-tems from developing
systematic evaluations of the contribution of buildings to sustainability of the
built environment by taking into account social and ecological processes
shaping the relation-ships between human settlements and the environment
(du Plessis and Cole, 2011).
To overcome such a problem, recently these different systems have
implemented the neighbourhood/community version of the tool (Karol and
Brunner, 2009) or adopted an urban perspective. However, they tend to
appreciate how a part of the whole city moves towards some pre-defined goals
of sustainable urban develop-ment through sustainable building practices, in
particular trying to give the right weight and place the proper attention to
social issues usually underestimated by the same systems when evaluating
sus-tainable buildings. Moreover, at the neighbourhood/community level, the
evaluation systems rarely consider a building as sustainable in relation to the
complex social and ecological functioning of the built environment. Although
they focus on the environmental im-pacts produced by buildings, as well as
on infrastructures and people behaviours, they do not consider key
relationships which actually re-ciprocally connect the building to the complex
functioning of the built environment.
The development of evaluation systems on this line of thinking in-duces
to gloss over the social and ecological complexity of the built environment
and assume that the building–city relationships are lin-ear: the more we build
or renovate buildings in a sustainable way by using eco-technologies, the
more we produce sustainable cities and reduce global environmental impacts
(Conte and Monno, 2011).
What is lacking is the construction of a theory of the built environ-ment
enabling the construction of evaluation approaches of the sus-tainability of a
building based on a tighter relationship between the micro and the macro
level of evaluation in order to relate the assess-ment of the sustainable
building to the characteristics of the built en-vironment that the building itself
contributes to shape.
These considerations confirm the need for a new generation of as-
sessment tools (Poston et al., 2010), with a specific focus on cross-scale
evaluation. The sustainable features of a building must be shown at different
scales, beyond the building one (Ruiz and Fernández, 2009), otherwise
sustainable building practices risk to remain too much focused on
technological contents disregarding other crucial aspects for exploiting their
innovation. In the absence of a cross-scale evaluation, building practices
cannot be innovated, so to cap-italise from an active contribution of
sustainable buildings to their context.
3. The main features of evaluation frameworks: strengths and
weaknesses
In such action scenario, a focus on the environmental performances of
buildings has been growing, making the use of performance-based evaluation
methods and framework structuring environmental criteria in an organised
fashion very significant, particularly because they per-mit to appreciate
qualitatively and when possible quantitatively the contribution of a building
to some crucial goals.
33
The performance approach used when dealing with buildings has become
increasingly interesting in assessing building design and op-eration. It is
focused on the real behaviour of a building, as a whole as well as in its parts,
under actual conditions of operation (Becker, 2008). Building performances
are then seen as the means by which a building and its parts ensure to satisfy
building needs, and so deter-mine the ‘building quality’. This is an essential
perspective in design-ing buildings, since any design choice has to be made in
order to assure the required building quality, thinking the building as an inte-
grated system of technical solutions, for respecting several require-ments.
Moreover, the performance approach suggests that the building quality can,
and must be, evaluated just through the assess-ment of building performances
during operation. Therefore evalua-tion methods are usually based on
indicators able to measure performances of buildings and building parts; so
that, indicators can be referred to expected as well as actual performances of a
building, allowing on one side to compare different design solutions and on
the other to monitor the actual behaviour of a building during opera-tion.
Finally, performance-based evaluation methods offer a structure and focus for
design teams and create a common language which has the potential to
promote an open dialogue oriented to identify widely accepted performance
indicators and their related estimation methods.
As already stated, at present, there are many environmental assess-ment
tools for buildings using the performance approach (Kajikawa et al., 2011):
some are internationally known and used, although they can be locally
interpreted; others have been mainly developed related to specific countries,
and therefore are used in those coun-tries (Xiaoping et al., 2009). However,
they show some common features; at a glance, they are: 1) environmentally
driven; 2) based on indicators of building performances; and 3) score based.
The indicators used in the systems are mainly focused on a ratio-nal
utilisation of resources, with an emphasis on energy saving and efficiency, as
well as on health and well-being of building occupants (Omer, 2008b).
However, the environmental indicators are stressed, so to use the results of
the assessment of a building for promoting en-vironmentally friendly
practices and an enlarged stakeholders debate in the building sector (Tatari
and Kucukvar, 2011). In this way, a shift-ing from usual to ecological
construction practices is expected, for a better compatibility of the building
with the environment. This de-scription confirms that, even though
sustainability concerns related to building performance evaluation actually
imply to ensure human well-being on a long-term basis (Feifer, 2011), much
more has to be made in order to improve social and economic indicators in
the as-sessment systems.
Because of the environmental concern, the evaluation frameworks have
promoted the innovation of building technologies mainly aimed at saving
non-renewable resources, particularly for energy produc-tion and use (Clarke
et al., 2008), but always focusing on the perfor-mance of the individual
building, for selecting design choices more ‘sustainable’ than others according
to the available assessment tools (Segurado et al., 2009). Using these
environmentally friendly technol-ogies in a building to be built or renovated,
does not only influence design solutions concerning building materials
(Bribián et al., 2011) and components (Omer, 2008c), at any stage of the
building process but also implies that the sustainable performances of such
building design solutions can be then evaluated by means of environmental
assessment systems (Pulselli et al., 2007) and thus certified. In fact, basing the
assessment systems on ranking methods for assigning scores to the building,
favours that a certificate of sustainability may be issued, in this way
facilitating the end-user interpretation of sus-tainability performances
deriving from design solutions and opera-tional behaviour of a building.
Due to the current buildingcentric approach, though the evaluation
frameworks use different indicators and areas of evaluation as well as
different criteria to evaluate scores in different areas, at the end the
34 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40
partial scores are linked in a single final score of the building under
assessment. Moreover, beyond their common goal of measuring sus-
tainability of buildings, these environmental assessment tools and their related
performance indicators are expression of a specific inter-pretation of
sustainability of building, and as a consequence, the eval-uation of sustainable
buildings results affected from that, gaining a better or worst score depending
on the vision implicit in the tool (Reed et al., 2009).
Despite the idea that sustainability is a process rather than a goal, the use
of building performance indicators is intended to define the whole
contribution of the individual building to environmental sus-tainability of the
city or a neighbourhood by means of an absolute value/score related to
environmental performances of the building. From this perspective, it seems
that the whole sustainability of the built environment can be derived from the
simple addition of individ-ual sustainability of its parts. Yet sustainability
calls for using a sys-temic approach, considering many factors and their
relationships, respecting the complexity and dynamism that affects territorial
con-texts (Xing et al., 2009). The context is the most influential element of the
assessment, and it must be intended in a large, comprehensive way, by
disaggregating physical aspects – like geography, climate, etc.
– and non-physical aspects – like legislation, local habits, etc., all in one
culture – of a place. The environmental assessment tools available today try
to do that, but as already argued, indicators are unable to re-port on
interrelated effects of sustainable buildings on the environ-ment and the urban
context.
In order to overcome the limitations of current performance-based
evaluation frameworks, by retaining their usefulness, it is nec-essary to
identify performance indicators able to get the sustainability of relationships
between buildings and the built environment, so making possible to evaluate
different paths towards a sustainable de-velopment. In particular, such
indicators must be holistic for grasping the specific requirements of
sustainability emerging from a local con-text, linking building to urban design
and driving the development and implementation of solutions which result
appropriate in a partic-ular situation. Working on this line, we also take the
challenge to rec-ognise key performance indicators that are important in
considering sustainability concerns varying at different scales and aimed at
reach-ing consensus among stakeholders, believing that better decisions can
be made with more shared information among experts, and into models
(ALwaer and Clements-Croome, 2010).
4. The integrated building–urban evaluation
4.1. Milestones of the approach
The issues debated in the paragraphs above have highlighted some crucial
pitfalls underlying the current available evaluation sys-tems and opened up a
possible path towards the construction of eval-uation approaches for
overcoming some of their current limitations. In particular, the discussion has
shown that there is an increasing need of going beyond the buildingcentric
approach to verify the suit-ability of sustainable building design solutions in a
cross-scale per-spective based on a theory of sustainability of the built
environment within which the sustainability of a building is evaluated through
ho-listic performance indicators.
Rather than linking the sustainable building evaluation to a specif-ic scale,
a cross-scale evaluation implies adopting an integrated build-ing–urban
approach aimed at considering to which extent sustainable building practices
effectively participate to regeneration or decay of the quality of the urban
space and social and ecological processes. Re-ciprocally, a cross-scale
evaluation implies considering in what extent the quality of urban space and
social and ecological processes shaping the built environment determine the
effective sustainability of the sustainable building practices which are going
to be used. The object of cross-scale evaluation approaches is still the
building and the goal
of the evaluation is its sustainability, but the evaluation of building
sustainability has to be expressed in relation to the distinctive recip-rocal
interactions connecting buildings, the urban space and the so-cial and
ecological dynamics shaping the built environment in which the building is
situated.
To reach this purpose and forcing to move beyond the dominant
conceptualisation of what is a sustainable building and face cognitive gaps
concerning the building's contribution to the sustainability of the urban
context, the integrated evaluation should be a consequence of the
conceptualisation of the functioning and sustainability of the built
environment rather than a reflection of the definition of sustain-ability
generically intended as result of three interacting dimensions, namely the
social, environmental and economic.
Working in an integrated perspective, the association of a sustain-able
building to a product intensively using eco-technologies has to be overcome
in favour of a more radical conceptualisation of the in-novation of sustainable
building practices. Thus, within the integrated building-urban approach the
sustainable building is not only a pro-ducer of environmental pressures, but
also a pro-active complex sys-tem resulting of an evolving field of practices
characterised by a continuous learning process on the reciprocal relationships
among the building and the built environment.
Of course, this does not mean that eco-technologies do not have to play a
significant role for sustainable buildings (Guy, 2010), but rath-er recognising
that the sum of building eco-technological solutions does not necessarily
correspond to a sustainable building. In fact, a building can sustainably
behave in different ways and be sustainable even without a large content of
advanced technologies. As such, the integrated evaluation should be also able
to answer questions like: as can be sustainable a 500 m tall building in a
desert, although it is green, and technologically advanced? Or more simply,
what renova-tion works are the most effective, using what kind of sustainable
technology, for an existing building stock, if we consider the whole set of
buildings rather than every building per se?
From the operative point of view, in order to promote the innova-tion of
building practices through dialogue, reflection and learning, and facilitate the
qualitative and when possible quantitative assess-ment of building
contribution on the built environment sustainability, the integrated evaluation
could profit from the performance-based approach and related indicators.
However, the performance indica-tors should be holistic in order to grasp the
specific requirements of sustainability emerging from a local context, so to
link building to urban design and drive the development and implementation
of solu-tions resulting appropriate in a particular situation. In this way the
building evaluation could assist a ‘conversation’ among a broad range of
perspectives and stakeholders' interests and values.
On this line of reasoning in the following, we first construct a conceptual
model of the built environment and its sustainability and then we translate it
into an integrated building–urban evalua-tion framework.
4.2. The conceptual model
As highlighted in the paragraph above, in order to construct the integrated
building–urban evaluation approach, we have to define what is the urban
context in which the building is localised starting from a conceptualisation of
the built environment in terms of rela-tionships among buildings, the urban
space and the environment. Dif-ferent theories have tried to conceptualise the
complexity of such relationships. Some of them draw on the landscape
ecology and focus on impacts produced by the built environment on the
connec-tivity among ecosystems or their networks (Forman, 1997). Others try
to identify crucial relationships among human and ecological sys-tems
(Alberti et al., 2003) or look for recognising the environmental impacts
generated by buildings in relation to a specific urban mor-phology (Garcia et
al., 2009). Yet, none of these theories, which are
 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40 35

mainly focused on land uses, is able to model in a comprehensive way the
built environment and permit to evaluate the contribution of sus-tainable
buildings to urban sustainability (Williams et al., 2000).
Our conceptualisation of the urban context primarily draws on an
understanding of the built environment as social–ecological system (SES)
since it responds better to our goal to evaluate a building con-tribution to the
sustainability of the urban context in which it is loca-lised using performance
indicators. By blurring the usual division between urbanised and natural
worlds, the SES emphasises the com-plexity of social, ecological, and
geophysical systems, but conceptual-ises such a complexity in terms of
multiple interacting agents and relationships. Rather than being homogenous,
from a SES perspective, the built environment varies depending on a specific
signature (Alberti et al., 2003) that is the set of distinctive relationships and
dy-namics connecting the social and ecological systems. This allows
reconsidering the built environment as a mosaic of built contexts (or urban
contexts), constituted by complex social–ecological rela-tionships and
dynamics of different levels and scales.
One of the key variables reporting on the typology of social– ecological
relationships shaping the signature of a built context is the metabolism
(Wolman, 1969). As well known, the standard def-inition of urban
metabolism only provides information on flows of matter and energy, and
environmental pressures produced by urban development in terms of the
amount of resources extracted or pollution generated. However, following
recent studies, we refer to an extended conception of it (Kennedy et al., 2011;
Garcia et al., 2009; Minx et al., 2011). This goes beyond its stan-dard
definition to include aspects of urban structure, environmen-tal quality and
lifestyles.
Instead of seeing the diversities and specificities of an urban con-text
through a specific spatial scale, the built environment becomes a complex
assemblage of interacting built contexts each of them char-acterised by a
specific metabolism. Thus, we redefine the urban con-text as urban matrix. In
such definition the word matrix underlines that the context in which a building
is situated is the result of a dis-tinctive mix of social–ecological relationships
existing among urban structure, environmental qualities, lifestyles and flows
of matter and energy. Since the urban matrix is defined by a specific
metabolism it is not linked to a specific spatial scale. Furthermore it is the
result of local and global social–ecological relationships.
Within the urban matrix, buildings can be seen as complex sys-tems
which interact with the urban matrix metabolism through their performances.
For a better analysis of the interactions between the sustainable building and
the urban matrix, the building perfor-mances can be identified in relation to
the building quality, and grouped in the following classes: site, indoor and
outdoor environ-ment, operation and technical design. In fact buildings do not
only in-teract with the metabolism of the urban matrix in terms of generation
or reduction of environmental impacts and flows of matter and ener-gy, but
they are also agents which interfere with social–ecological processes and
contribute to shape and change them in a non-predefined way (Fig. 1).
Besides giving an analytical perspective the SES approach also in-duces
to adopt conceptualisation of sustainability of the built envi-ronment less
ambiguous and vague than that usually shaping the building environmental
Urban matrix metabolism Flows
Building performances
Site Environmental
Structure Technical design quality
Indoor and outdoor environment
Operation
Lifestyles
Fig. 1. Buildings in the urban matrix.
In our model, vulnerability is taken as a key display of the resil-ience of
the urban matrix. Vulnerability and resilience are opposite, but
complementary, parameters of a scale describing the sustainabil-ity of the
built environment (Daniel and Ortmann, 2011). Their vari-ations represent the
quality and the direction of the change under scrutiny. Following recent
discussions on the evolution of the concept of vulnerability (Adger, 2006), in
our model vulnerability is defined as the susceptibility of the urban matrix
with respect to harms produced from buildings, and indicates the absence of
its capacity to adapt. Through vulnerability we can appreciate the current
sustainability performances of the urban matrix and through the variation of
vulner-ability produced by an agent or stressor on the urban matrix we can
evaluate the quality and the direction of the change under scrutiny. Since
vulnerability and resilience imply a shared definition of accept-able thresholds
of change, these concepts can support the confronta-tion and dialogue among
actors involved in a process or project of development.
Following the idea of urban matrix and its sustainability sketched so far,
the building can be seen as an agent which through its own performances
alters the metabolism of the matrix by reducing or in-creasing its
vulnerability. Thus the contribution of a building to the sustainability of an
urban matrix can be evaluated as the direction of change induced on the
metabolism of an urban matrix and appreciat-ed as a shift away from the
current vulnerability of the urban matrix along a shared scale of vulnerability.
Environmental impacts and pressures produced by a building have to be
reinterpreted in relation to the variation of vulnerability of the matrix which
influences its ca-pacity to absorb and adapt to disturbances and perturbations.
Moving from the definition of urban matrix and its sustainability to the
building–urban evaluation model we can reframe the evaluation of
sustainable buildings in terms of resilient interactions between building and
urban matrix performances, these last referring to its vulnerability. In such a
conceptual model (Fig. 2) the components of both the metabolism of the
urban matrix and the building quality be-come categories of performance
assessable in an integrated way
Urban matrix vulnerability Sustainable building
Urbanmatrixmeta
bolism

quality

assessment systems. From the SES perspec-tive sustainability can also be

Buildi

Lifestyles Operation
ng

seen as depending on variations in-duced by any development project and Structure Holistic Technical design
process on the resilience of dynamics shaping a specific metabolism.
Perfor Indoor and
Resilience is the ability of humans and the ecosystems in which they live to Flows
mance outdoor
resist to changes brought about by external and internal impacts that threaten environment
Environmental Indica
the bal-ance, stability and cohesion of the social–ecological system (SES).
quality tors Site
Al-though a contested concept (Folke, 2006; Holling, 2001), the resilience
relevance in facing the challenge of sustainability is shared in many fields of
research just because of its focus on how systems re-spond to change.

Fig. 2. The integrated building–urban evaluation model.

36 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40
through the use of few holistic performance indicators. Such indica-tors
enable to identify positive or negative changes of the sustainable building
performances on the urban matrix vulnerability (Fig. 3).
The indicators in our model are holistic since they respect the so-cial–
ecological perspective and integrate different scales of evalua-tion. They
permit to evaluate the sustainability of a building in terms of its incidence on
moving the urban matrix vulnerability: the higher the incidence on shifting
vulnerability of the urban matrix to-wards lower values, the more the building
will be sustainable for the matrix. This implies that, for example, a building
with a high sus-tainability score according to an environmental assessment
system will not necessarily have a high incidence on the urban matrix
sustainability.
The object of the evaluation is still the building and the goal of the
evaluation is its sustainability, which can be differently interpreted but also
efficaciously reported by means of a value to be easily under-stood, such as
the measure of performances. Therefore, the holistic in-dicators are still
related to the building, and based on its building performances, as occurs in
the available environmental assessment systems. But, they function as a
bridge between the sustainable build-ing and the built environment,
expressing the reliability of a building to show sustainable performances not
only as an individual building, but also as a part of the urban matrix.
4.3. The assessment framework
To test the potentials of our building–urban evaluation conceptual model,
we have translated it in an assessment framework (Table 1.) which responds
to the need of: (i) assessing the contribution of sus-tainable buildings to
changes of the urban matrix sustainability; (ii) adopting categories for
evaluating sustainable buildings in relation to the urban matrix vulnerability;
and (iii) determining holistic per-formance indicators for grasping the
sustainability of buildings in re-lation to the sustainability of the built
environment.
In the assessment framework the first three columns are related to the
urban matrix. Specifically, the first column describes the four clas-ses of SES
relationships which constitute the urban matrix metabolism in its local and
global components. The second one disaggregates each class in social–
environmental categories of evaluation so that they could be assessed using,
in the third column, new or already existing indicators. These indicators
represent the performances of the urban matrix necessary to evaluate its
vulnerability.
The last three columns in Table 1 refer to the building and its eval-uation
of sustainability, therefore they are composed under the name of ‘sustainable
building’. We use more than one of the existing assess-ment systems in order
to exploit their diversity while avoiding redun-dancy, and re-distribute their
usual categories and indicators looking for a correspondence to categories and
indicators of the sustainable urban matrix. At this step and for the purpose of
our work, we refer
Sustainable Building
Holistic Performance Indicator
High Low
Urban matrix vulnerability
Fig. 3. Holistic performance indicators.
to categories and indicators of two of the most popular assessment systems,
because of they are used in the country in which we live. 1
The last column in the table shows that the building quality, and
consequently the sustainable performance of a building, is based on the
quality of four essential aspects, which we recognise in: site, in-door and
outdoor environment, operation, and technical design. Moreover, considering
which kind of building performances the indi-cators (fifth column) can
measure, we group them in categories (sixth column), some of them re-
proposing usual categories of assess-ment tools, and some of a new
interpretation for allowing a better correspondence to categories of the urban
matrix. They are: urban in-tegration, ecological integration, infrastructure
facilities, indoor com-fort, indoor air quality, outdoor pollution reduction,
environmental load prevention, building systems, building services, resources
con-sumption and environmental loads.
The fourth column refers to the holistic performance indicators we
introduced above. Still related to the building, they are able to assess the
incidence of the sustainable building on the urban matrix, i.e. the variation of
its vulnerability from the current status. We name such incidence as
‘reliability’, a property expressing sustainable perfor-mances of a building as a
part of the urban matrix.
5. Discussion
Even representing a preliminary step in the validation of our cross-scale
evaluation model, the construction of the assessment framework allows us to
make some fundamental and interrelated considerations on the conceptual
model. These concern the efficacy of the model in opening new possibilities
of innovating sustainable building practices beyond the buildingcentric
approach, thus comple-menting current evaluation systems.
On the one hand, we argue that the integrated building–urban model
works as an open and heuristic tool having the potential of shad-ing new
lights on the meaning of sustainable buildings and reflecting on which kinds
of building practice innovation are being carried out. The translation of the
model into an assessment framework forces to make tacit knowledge explicit
and thus available to be questioned and debated. This triggers a learning
process implying the revision and change of taken for granted practices and
routines and the creation of new, innovative ones (Shön, 1983). On the other
hand, we maintain that the model induces to face cognitive gaps underlying
both our cross-scale evaluation model and the current evaluation systems.
The heuristic capability of the model has been shown several times during
the construction of the integrated building–urban as-sessment framework.
The first phase of the construction of the assessment framework has
clearly shown that the translation of our cross-scale model can be hindered by
an enduring attitude to consider the building and the built environment as
detached worlds to be mechanistically reconnected, and a routinary use of
well-established areas of evalua-tion. Specifically, such tacit knowledge
prevents from connecting the quality aspects of a sustainable building to the
sustainability of urban matrix metabolism, which instead is a prerequisite for
carrying out the cross-scale evaluation.
However, the SES perspective underlying our model is able to make tacit
practices and routines explicit, thus forcing to create areas and categories of
evaluation completely different from those usually adopted in current systems
for evaluating both sustainable buildings and the urban context.
In fact, the definition of these new areas and categories of evalua-tion has
to be carried out by means of an interdisciplinary and itera-tive process
assuring a tight correspondence between the evaluation
1
The assessment systems we refer to in this paper are: LEED Italia (http://www.
gbcitalia.org/) and Protocollo ITACA (http://www.itaca.org/valutazione_sostenibilita. asp), the
Italian version respectively of LEED and SBTool.
 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40 37

Table 1
The assessment framework.

Urban matrix vulnerability Sustainable Sustainable building

building reliability

Urban Categories Performance indicators Holistic Performance indicators Categories Building quality
metabolism performance
indicators
Structure Urban design •Urban density Incidence on •Site selection Urban integration Site
•Functional mix structure •Site development
•Quality of constructions •Site urbanisation level
•Pollution potential of •Urban context integration
constructions
•Fragmentation of ecosystems •Development density and community
connectivity
•Porosity to ecosystems •Recreation areas
•Permeability to ecological •Magnetic field protection
functions
•Transformability
•Quality of network systems
(drainage, urban lighting…)
•Ecological compatibility of
network systems
Ecological •Integrity •Stormwater design Ecological integration
networks •Functionality •Green areas
•Connectivity •Permeability of soil
•Landscape integration
Infrastructures •Quality •Alternative transportation Infrastructure facilities
•Ecological compatibility •Public transport accessibility
•Fragmentation of ecosystems •Bicycle facilities
•Accessibility •Infrastructures vicinity
•Integration •Cultural and commercial activities
•Pollution potential distance
Environmental Climate •Resilience to climate change Incidence on •Ventilation Indoor comfort Indoor and
quality effects environmental outdoor
Air •Healthiness quality •Thermal comfort environment
•Pollution •Daylight
•Acoustic comfort
•Low emitting material Indoor air quality
•Indoor pollutant control
•Radon control
•Outdoor air delivery monitoring
Soil •Healthiness •Heat island effect Outdoor pollution
•Pollution reduction
•Carrying capacity •Construction activity pollution
prevention
•Fragility (erosion, …) •Light pollution reduction
Water •Healthiness
•Pollution
•Resource availability
Landscape •Integrity •Brownfield redevelopment Environmental load
•Capacity of maintenance •Site contamination level prevention
Lifestyles Consumption •Uses of resources Incidence on •Controllability of systems Building systems Operation
•Ecological behaviours lifestyles •Integration of systems
(recycling,…)
•Balance among different •Waste management
economic activities
Practices of use •Capacity of maintenance of •Management plan development and Building Services
urban structure implementation
•Capacity of innovation of urban •Building performances maintenance
structure •Measurement and verification
Social structure •Social and economic structure
and cohesion •Capacity of community
building and organisation
Flows Energy and •Emergy Incidence on flows •Energy requirementsa: HVAC, hot water, Resources consumption Technical design
matter electricity and environmental loads
•Ecological footprint •Materialsa: regional,
renewable, recycled,
reusable, demountable, ecological
•Watera: reduction of potable, reuse
a
For purposes of summary of the table, in this cell the many indicators currently used for the category we name Resources consumption and Environmental loads, were grouped under a few
voices: Energy requirements, Materials, and Water. It is then important to keep in mind that they are many and weigh around 60% in the evaluation, in both the as-sessment systems we considered
(see note 1).

areas and categories used for describing the building performances and those depends on the degree of correlation which is established between the
used for describing the urban matrix. The interdependence between the building and the urban matrix areas and categories of evaluation.
building and the urban matrix, and thus the efficacy of the framework in Although our model forces to move beyond the idea of a sustain-able
carrying out an integrated building–urban evaluation, building as a complicated and closed system, and reconsider it
38 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40
as an “ongoing, dynamic process within an ever-changing environ-ment” (du
Plessis and Cole, 2011: p. 447), the tendency to assume a building
contribution to the urban matrix sustainability in terms of environmental
pressures and impacts appears hard to defy. Trying to make operative the idea
of a building as a complex system cannot be achieved exclusively by
redistributing usual categories of evalua-tion and indicators of sustainable
buildings within new evaluation areas. Nor can this purpose be carried out
adding new indicators within the new evaluation areas.
The concept of building reliability, which in our model expresses the
sustainable performances of a building as a part of the urban matrix, is crucial
to overcome the idea of a building as a complicated entity adding or
subtracting sustainability to a generic and inactive urban context. However,
the operative translation of this concept into an assessment tool has required
defining the reliability in a more precise way.
Thus, during the process of construction of the assessment frame-work the
meaning of the reliability has been redefined as the adaptive capacity of
sustainable building practices to interact with the vulner-ability and resilience
of the urban matrix. Such a definition of the reli-ability is able to express the
sustainability of a building as the contribution of the sustainable building to
the sustainability of the built environment in which it is localised. As such the
reliability emerges as a property of the building itself which depends on and
changes the context.
The reliability has proved to be an innovative way to think to sus-tainable
buildings since it addresses both the features of our cross-scale model and the
need to deal with uncertainties and conflicting perspectives underlying the
knowledge mobilised to define what a sustainable building practice is. Thus, it
opens the evaluation to the possibility of inventing, changing and innovating
existing technologies.
Consider for example an eco-technology as photovoltaic panels used in a
new construction or renovation works: this technology is assumed as
ecological and today almost essential to be included into design, so to make
the building sustainable. Using the available assessment systems, such a
design choice is rewarded with a high score of sustainability since it
determines a significant decrease of en-vironmental loads and pressure
produced by the building. On the contrary, in our framework the sustainable
feature of this technology is evaluated in terms of the incidence it has on
structure, environ-mental quality, lifestyles and flows characterising the
metabolism of an urban matrix. When the incidence does not improve the
resilience of the urban matrix, i.e. does not contribute to reduce the
vulnerability of an urban context, then the reliability value of the technology
appli-cation to the building is questioned. As a consequence, other technol-
ogies and design choices can be explored, making the building more
sustainable for its context.
Once redefined, the reliability concept has also offered the necessary
interpretative and connective framework without which the holistic
performance indicators could only evaluate individual components of the
incidence of a building on the vulnerability of the urban matrix, in-stead of
contributing to define the whole reliability of a building. At the same time,
this definition of reliability has permitted to sketch very pre-liminary
guidelines to define the content of holistic indicators. Since ho-listic indicators
evaluate the adaptive capacity of sustainable building practices, they have to
refer on both actual and potential sustainable building performances. The
adaptive perspective of our model implies including within the potential
performance of a building its expected behaviours reconsidered in relations to
risks due to the radical uncer-tainty (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993) of our
knowledge.
The efficacy of holistic indicators in our model lies in the capability to
synthetically grasp a clear and specific kind of social–ecological relation-
ships which certain building practices are going to construct between
buildings and the built environment. The process of construction of the
assessment framework has also confirmed the need to use few holis-tic
performance indicators. Being few, they can be easily interrelated to evaluate
the reliability of a sustainable building.
The efficacy of our cross-scale model in overcoming the building-centric
approach has also emerged in relation to the need to reorganise, redistribute,
and integrate indicators and categories of evaluation, by reflecting on their
significance and appropriateness in describing the sustainability of a building.
In constructing the assessment framework, indicators and differ-ent areas
of evaluation used to evaluate the different aspects of the building quality in
the current assessment tools have to be reorga-nised and redistributed in a
more balanced way. In fact, it has emerged that a high density of indicators
with heavier weights char-acterise some areas of evaluation, which are
currently considered the most significant for building sustainability. This is
the case, for exam-ple, of indoor air quality and comfort, as well as resources
consump-tion and environmental loads. Instead, outdoor pollution reduction
and environmental load prevention and infrastructure facilities ap-pear less
represented. Urban and ecological integration, building sys-tems, and building
services are even underrepresented by only a few indicators, despite the
increasing relevance of these categories for the assessment systems.
Moreover, since indicators used in assessment tools are expres-sion of a
vision of sustainability related to buildings and based on the actual –
commonly recognised – sustainable building design prac-tice (Wallhagen and
Glaumann, 2011), the framework has shown what features of a specific urban
context are today neglected partially or completely when designing a
building. It is quite evident, for ex-ample, that indicators of sustainable
buildings able to change life-styles are few and almost far from an adequate
grasping of the relationships with the urban context. In particular, we find no
indica-tor characterising the incidence of a sustainable building on the vul-
nerability of an urban matrix as far as social structure and cohesion is
concerned.
Thus, the process of reorganisation and redistribution has asked for the
identification of new indicators in order to strengthen the cat-egories of
evaluation underestimated and underrepresented. The search of new
indicators aimed at grasping the relationships between a building and its
context has implied the development of new ways of evaluating sustainable
building design practices, based on different parameters for the assessment.
As it has happened so far, new indica-tors, their redistribution and weights,
stimulate the building design activity towards new solutions more satisfying
new requirements.
6. Conclusions
Although the available assessment systems have shown their use-fulness
in producing a new environmental building paradigm, there is an increasing
need to overcome their buildingcentric approach in order to innovate
sustainable building practices. The paper takes this challenge by proposing a
cross-scale evaluation approach and a conceptual model. The object of our
evaluation approach is still the building and the goal of the evaluation is its
sustainability, but the evaluation crosses different scales connecting buildings,
the urban space and the social and ecological dynamics shaping the built envi-
ronment in which the building is situated.
Drawing on a SES perspective of the built environment and adopt-ing a
resilience perspective to define the urban matrix sustainability, the integrated
building–urban evaluation model we propose: goes beyond the idea of a
building as a complicated and closed system to ap-preciate it as an ongoing,
dynamic process within an ever-changing urban matrix; focuses on the
building's contribution to the resilience of the urban matrix; links the
assessment of performances to the con-cept of reliability of the building.
In doing this, our conceptual model can complement the current
sustainable building assessment systems scenario. In fact, the inte-grated
building–urban evaluation model works as a heuristic tool, supporting the
acquisition of a better insight into the complexity which characterises the
relationships between a building and the
 E. Conte, V. Monno / Environmental Impact Assessment Review 34 (2012) 31–40
urban environment. It not only deals with tacit assumptions which risk
constraining the possibility to further innovate sustainable build-ing practices,
but also shades new lights on the meaning of sustain-able buildings and
innovation of building practices.
The potential of our integrated building–urban evaluation model lies in its
focus on the reliability of sustainable building design solu-tions rather than in
relating the sustainability of a building to its abil-ity to reduce environmental
loads, pressures and impacts. The reliability of sustainable buildings
represents a new perspective in carrying out the sustainable building
evaluation, since it expresses the adaptive capability of sustainable building
practices. It is an inno-vative way to think to sustainable building practices
which deals with uncertainties and conflicting perspective underlying the
knowledge mobilised to define what a sustainable building practice is. This
also opens new possibilities of inventing, changing and innovating the current
use of technologies.
Analogously, the holistic performance indicators we propose play a
crucial role in carrying out an integrated evaluation of a building
sustainability since they allow crossing the scales of evaluation by connecting
them. Furthermore, they improve the sustainability of the design process by
simplifying the evaluation of different building design solutions and
favouring a quick and easy comparison among different solutions in the same
design.
Our vision of an integrated building–urban evaluation approach and
model opens up windows of opportunities which address the needs to
innovate sustainable building practices beyond the building-centric approach.
However, the assessment framework shows that our evaluation model needs
to be improved.
At present, the final goal of evaluating the performances of sus-tainable
buildings beyond the buildingcentric approach has been only partially
satisfied. The reliability remains a still vague concept which prevents from
better defining the holistic indicators. In order to overcome this problem, we
need to step towards the appli-cation of the evaluation model to some case
studies. In such a way, we could recognise what is needed to define better the
holistic indi-cators as well as the reliability due to its strong dependence from
the context.
Therefore, our future commitment will be to improve the integrat-ed
conceptual model, focusing our attention on the definition of holis-tic
indicators and reliability. To do this and for further testing the evaluation
model by using the assessment framework, we believe that including
stakeholders of the building process is crucial (du Plessis and Cole, 2011).
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