Abstract

According to the projections of the global population growth, in the year 2050 the human beings in the world will be more than 10 billion, of which more than 6 billion will live in the urban area. In order to solve this huge duty without compromising the availability of natural resources for the future generation, the built environment industry needs to be inspired by good examples of sustainable construction. For this reason the architectural field needs to be improved by a more holistic prospective, considering the building not as a technological machine, but as a living organism, which needs material and energy resources for living, produces waste and is completely integrated into surroundings. Moreover, starting from the necessity of driving the built environment industry towards a wider prospective, the “systemic design approach” proposed in this paper leads the understanding of the building as a part of a broad complex system, connected with the surroundings through material and energy flows and dependent on these for supplies and for managing its waste. The aim of this research is thus to compare different typologies of urbanization, in order to identify green-guidelines and a new awareness in the construction process starting from the analysis of emblematic case studies from the point of view of the optimization and reuse of material and energy resources.