Recommendations, Strategies, and Methodological Approaches to Sustainability
The sustainable transformation of regions calls for a methodical approach to set goals aligned with local parameters, mobilize stakeholders, converge efforts towards environmental sobriety, develop resilience to climate change, and increase desirability. This methodical approach is also necessary for the design, programming, implementation, and monitoring of sustainability over time. Our studio has developed, implemented, and tested these methods in the field, at different scales in land use planning.
When we investigate the integration of the ecological transition in land use planning, we look at upstream sustainability programming at various scales: the metropolitan region, the peri-urban area, the targeted development sector, a macro lot of real estate developments, and even a public space or a building. At each scale, we apply programming and prescriptive approaches that have in common that they are strategic, interdisciplinary, and specific. To adopt a change in practices, we all need to opt for the strategies that best match the available resources, constraints, and local actors involved.
Sustainable transformation charters provide a set of development strategies and actions at different scales, based on a diagnosis of resources and local constraints. Each of these strategies is aimed at each of the key actors who are then expected to adapt their practices in ways that favor the energy and ecological transition. Oftentimes, this encourages the actors to move outside their respective domains of expertise to collaborate and interact in new ways. Local authorities, state agencies, developers, municipal technical departments, private real estate operators, social landlords, managing bodies, and users and inhabitants are all concerned by these changes at their respective level.
Sustainable development standards translate these actions into explicit and measurable design and specification levers. Without being dogmatic about it, it is a matter of defining, for each project and for each actor, the appropriate objective that takes into account what is both ambitious and achievable. Decision matrices explain the coherence of these actions at the different scales while identifying the role of each of the actors concerned. “Sustainability figures” then translate these actions into design principles that offer solutions to tackle multiple environmental phenomena at once. These sustainability figures feed into sustainable development specifications and may concern both the scale of real estate operations and that of urban development projects. Our studio has introduced this approach through sustainability figures to bring all stakeholders together in the same design effort.