Sustainability in the built environment: a new holistic taxonomy of aspects for decision making

The new agenda of sustainability requires a change in emphasis and a change in the criteria through which sustainability is evaluated in planning and design. It requires the adoption of a suitable framework which enables decision makers (designers, planners, local authorities) to understand the problems implied in a decision. This paper seeks to illustrate the relevance of the framework developed on the basis of a multi-modal system approach for understanding and evaluating sustainability in the built environment. The developed framework is able to consider different levels of information and structure all relevant issues in an ordered manner, helping decision makers to handle the multiplicity of the issues embodied in the concept of sustainability. Potentially, it can be applied to a wide variety of planning situations, but it still requires the support of a suitable IT tool.