NZEB 2050 | Visioni possibili

The continuous and too often abused use of the word 'sustainability' has taken away its meaning, depriving it of foundational content, making it generic and ephemeral its contents. But 'sustainability' is an emerging paradigm that transcends any disciplinary boundaries. It has a potentially deep influence on all human activities and in the evolution of the human environment, requiring a careful reflection on the influence that can have. ‘Sustainability’ is a dynamic concept because it is based on relations between different complex systems: the ecological system and the anthropic system. In physics, in a complex system the single parts are affected by local interactions that cause changes in the whole structure. Science can detect local changes, but can not predict a future state of the system considered as a whole: "[...] in complex systems the unpredictability and paradox are al- ways present and some things remain unknown." (Morin 1983). Such unpredictability exponentially increases considering how the anthropic system, more than the natural one, is involved by sudden changes: which are political, economic, social, cultural, technological changes. For this reason the 'sustainability' appears unpredictable and it cannot be evaluated in an objective and measurable way without simplifications. Moreover, the results of any partial assessment have a short life, because they are influenced by the constant change of the balance of the relationships within the systems. For those reasons any planning of sustainability should be linked to immediate objectives and to the opportunities it offers in terms of economic and social development. If we want to fully understand the contribution that the technological and environ- mental design can give to the planning of sustainability, we must put firmly at the core of our argumentation 'society and economy' rather than 'numbers and statistics' which are the results of those several methods of environmental impact assessment nowadays used. The relationship between the development of the environmental actions and policies and the social and economic progress is tightened. To think at different models of development means: to think also about how to link the economic development with the social and environmental one; and structuring these three level of development starting from the features of local contexts (Langer, 1994). Moreover, until the eco-efficiency of the territory and the arrangement of settlements will not recognized as a primary driver of economic and social development, the results of environmental re- search will remain a theoretical experimentation used by an 'elite' of intellectuals and academics or used by some politician to reach his electoral success. Anyway, today we are at the beginning of a transformation of the settlement patterns based on the concept of network (infrastructure, energy, social, information). The re- search should proceed with clarity towards the development of new models. Models which should be not only hypothesis, but guide for the actions. And without losing the 'problematic dimension' of the concept of 'model' to avoid any 'instruction booklet' based on unlikely certainties (Augé, 2012)