The regulatory apparatus at the service of sustainable planning of the built environment: the case of law 338/2000

It is wrongly assumed that the environmental sustainability of the building organism is only achievable thanks to the contribution of the systems and their ability to reduce harmful emissions and generate energy from alternative and natural sources. So, system projects have assumed an increasingly considerable importance both in terms of the quantity of documents and the cost of the building. The quantity and complexity of the most recent plant engineering solutions amplify the difficulty of dialogue between the different design levels (architectural, structural and system design) forcing the professionals involved to compromise that end up disregarding the expected quality. Although it is now clear that the design levels must progress hand in hand from the first hypotheses, and that all must contribute equally to the overall sustainability of the intervention, this does not always happen by preferring to derogate from the system designers the choice of environmentally sustainable solutions. In summary, more and more often we rely on the technical solutions of the machines used, rather than on the technological qualities of the project. This inevitably involves problems in the construction, operation, and eventual decommissioning phase of the building, especially in the public sphere where the low economic resources of the contracting stations are increasingly used in the purchase, maintenance, management, and disposal of plant engineering tools. A well-structured regulatory system can help to minimize these criticalities: this is the case of law 338, enacted in 2000 with the aim of increasing the availability of residences for university students, which is distinguished for the attention to the environmental issue, orienting the realization of accommodation places towards solutions able to contain waste, soil consumption, etc. The paper first describes and analyzes the attention paid by specific legislation to environmental sustainability especially in the field of building redevelopment; then, thanks to the analysis of unique case studies in terms of quantity and quality, resulting from a multi-year research activity carried out under research agreements with institutional bodies such as the MUR and CDP SpA, it structures original data, identifying and ranking the most innovative environmentally sustainable solutions used in the design of university residences and social housing more generally.