Integrating Expert and Common Knowledge for Sustainable Housing Management

Abstract

We are beginning to feel somewhat uneasy when speaking about sustainability in using the term in so wide a sense that it almost seems emptied of importance. In fact, the call for sustainability became essential when we realised that our world was in a serious state of environmental emergency, caused by men through their anthropisation processes and the blind trust in technological progress with no limits considered as inevitable and with necessarily positive outcomes. Thus, in 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development defined sustainable development as a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. That original definition already underlined the importance of the triple society-economy-environment system of relationships, with many technological, political, and institutional effects, so that development can be considered sustainable if it meets a correct social-economic-environmental equilibrium which dynamically evolves with time meeting changeable needs. Today, after more than a decade of systematic attention to and call for sustainability of human actions on the territory, we still cannot consider having produced encouraging results.