Arabic

Prof. Jorge Venegas

Dean, College of Architecture

Texas A&M University, USA

An Integrated, Transdisciplinary, and Evidence Based Approach for Built Environment Sustainability

21^st century challenges for urbanism, civil infrastructure systems, and facilities, cannot afford to continue following the same approaches that have been used to date in their development. Rather, they require new approaches that are bold, innovative, systems based, and contextually sensitive; from their planning, financing, development, and delivery, to their use, operation, maintenance, and end of service life. Within these approaches, governments, together with stakeholders in the public and private sectors, must work collaboratively at local, national, regional, and even international levels, to pursue strategies, mechanisms, and processes that will lead to a Sustainable Built Environment: All stakeholders, from government officials, policy makers, regulatory agencies, finance institutions, community leaders, through planners, architects, engineers, suppliers, builders, to end-users, must link, coordinate, and integrate their efforts as a single cohesive critical mass, pooling, leveraging, and sharing their resources, within public/private partnerships at any level, from local to international, in the pursuit of sustainable urbanism, sustainable civil infrastructure systems, and sustainable facilities.

This presentation will discuss three emerging trends toward the delivery of Built Environment Sustainability. The first trend focuses on three levels of Integration: (1) Integrated Project Delivery (IPD); (2) Integrated Design Process (IDP); and (3) Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Interoperability within the total life cycle of projects. The second trend focuses on transcending individual disciplines with the goal of a Transdisciplinary understanding of the built environment, through an imperative of unity of knowledge, and a concurrent concern with what is between disciplines, across different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines. Finally, the third trend focuses on Evidence Based practice, which is based on a questioning approach to practice that leads to scientific experimentation, meticulous observation, documentation, and analysis (as opposed to anecdotal case description), and cataloguing and archiving the evidence for dissemination and systematic retrieval.