Resumen de From low carbon buildings to sustainable cities. Sustainability transitions in the built environment towards the un agenda
This thesis addresses sustainability transitions in the built environment, from buildings to the metropolitan scale, while ranging from low carbon development to the multidimensional challenges currently faced by cities. Emphasis is made on the urban global south, with special focus on Latin America.
The work is structured in four stages. First stage focuses on finding a low carbon path for the building sector, based on scenario projections from existing policies. Under a life-cycle approach, results reveal a path consisting on reducing emissions from: 1) building materials and constructive systems; 2) energy use at operation stage for both new and existing buildings; and 3) residential waste management. Results show potential synergies between mitigation and adaptation goals, while showing that low carbon measures do not perform equal between industrialized economies in temperate regions and emerging economies in tropical climates, thereby highlighting the importance of science based and context specific policy making.
Second stage addresses current science, policy and practice relative to the sustainable BE, regarding thematic areas, goals and issues set by the New Urban Agenda (UN, 2017a). Findings show that mainstream scientific research, international certification systems and public policy instruments are mainly focused on energy efficiency and indoor comfort aspects. Hence, other sustainability concerns are conferred less importance. However, findings also show that some policy instruments issued in Latin America address topics of the global agenda in a more comprehensive way as compared to some green building certification schemes that have been widely disseminated over the last decades, suggesting that the Region is building self-sufficiency to align global issues with national priorities.
Third stage analyses the potential role of the built environment in fulfilling goals, targets and issues of the UN Agenda. Findings show that NUA underlines the critical role of spatial planning and design for realising inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities. When bringing the SDGs, the Paris Agreement and the Sendai Framework to the urban sphere, extensive and strong interactions concerning the built environment become evident. These results allow producing an integrative framework of the global agenda, useful for guiding directions towards urban sustainability transitions.
Fourth stage addresses urban transformative change by assembling perspectives on sustainability transitions on low carbon buildings and the sustainable built environment. Concerning low carbon buildings, findings show the pertinence of using a Multi-Level Perspective on transitions for designing policies. Although conventional instruments may still be useful, policies have to evolve on the use of novel instruments based on stakeholder networks, sequential experimentation and gradual up-scaling, in order to facilitate the progressive learning required by socio-technical systems to undergo long-term transitions. Concerning sustainability transitions in the built environment, an exploratory method was used here to 1) link analytic perspectives on sustainability transitions, thereby allowing to produce an integrative conceptual model of the built environment as a socio-technical-institutional-economic-ecologic system; 2) linking transition management perspectives in the Urban Transformative Capacity framework (Wolfram, 2016) and 3) connecting both the conceptual model and the managing framework with the UN agenda, in order to provide elements for issuing and navigating transformative urban policies.
