Paper short abstract:

This paper examines practical sustainability knowledge from the perspective of a design practitioner in the built environment, and how to excite people to higher levels of sustainable performance. In so doing it will examine how different parties understand related sustainability principles.

Paper long abstract:

The struggle towards sustainable global governance has demonstrated the fundamental problems to bringing clarity to decisions and actions and to social, environmental and economic equity when the states of development of countries vary widely.

However post-industrial understanding around sustainability has increased idiosyncratically. Many people now possess fragments of expert knowledge; far fewer have expertise in application and delivery.

The built environment poses a significant problem, characterised by the delivery (initiation, design, construction, and operation) of highly diverse non-repetitive projects, with multiple individuals who rarely work together. Projects are delivered with finite time scales and budgets. Furthermore many practitioners have limited knowledge of the skills and processes that were successfully used for thousands of years in pre-industrial society; so cannot access the highly integrated and interdependent virtues of a circular economy, which are inevitably going to need reproduction in the future.

This paper will examine the practical acquisition and dissemination of sustainability knowledge from the perspective of a design practitioner in the built environment, and how to excite people to action and then higher levels of sustainable performance.

It will examine how different parties understand differing principles such as sustainability, environmentalism, the climate, the green agenda and the complexities they struggle with in making sense of these interrelated and interconnected issues.

In doing so the aim will be to offer practical advice and strategies that will give insight to regulators, project promoters, financially interested parties, socially interested parties, authorities with jurisdiction, designers such as architects and engineers, and advisors on projects.