In this paper, we propose the concept of reliability as a way to introduce innovation in sustainable building design and built environment processes. For us reliability of agents and actions represents a new perspective for a radical restructuring of sustainability evaluation; in fact, reliability catches interactions between buildings and built environments, contextualizing design solutions and stimulating the regenerative capacities of a context. The paper highlights the much potential that reliability shows. It can be considered an operative tool to practice the regenerative approach; it can be a strong stimulus to innovate design activities; it can be a catalyst element of multiple stakeholders’ perspectives. In the attempt to address sustainability drawing on the regenerative approach, reliability stimulates the use of new conceptual tools, implies the application of new ways of acting, and challenges our knowledge and current technologies thus promoting innovation and experimentation.

Methods and systems for evaluating building and urban sustainability have become useful tools for supporting designing and planning of the built environment. Despite their relevance in implementing sustainable development, a new challenge is to overcome their limitations inhibiting a more effective and lasting sustainability. The paper presents a research working on the absence of spatial integration in existing evaluation systems, and advances a novel approach to re-interpret sustainability evaluation on conceptual, methodological and operational level. Key elements are: integrating the building and urban scales of sustainability evaluation by modelling the built environment as a socio-ecological system; re-framing sustainable building design as a spatial practice able to activate regenerative capacities of a place. Opening new frontiers for evaluation, this approach supports learning in designing and planning processes and helps decision-making actors to build creative solutions.

This paper reports the first results of an on-going research, which aims at bridging the gap between the sustainable building design and its expected potential benefit or impact considered at different urban scales. It proposes the concept of the urban matrix as a tool allowing a more holistic analysis and design of sustainable buildings. Some key performance indicators are singled out for reporting the relationships between sustainable design and the metabolism of the urban matrix; they are expected to be holistic, and usable as a tool for a sustainable design integrating buildings and cities.

This chapter discusses the concept of relational complexity as a crucial interpretative framework enabling relational/collaborative planning to produce alternative spatial and governance imaginations. The chapter begins by describing the relational planning code, specifically its point of view on agents, time and space, knowledge and the ‘proper’ processes through which managing the multiple relationships shaping places in order to discover new ways to live together in a city or neighbourhood. Then, it contrasts the relational complexity perspective with a Deleuzian understanding of the multiple dynamics shaping places in order to explore its potentialities in freeing creative energies by avoiding the reproduction of existing oppression and marginalization. Such exploration is carried out by mapping the social cartography of one of the many governance processes inspired by the relational complexity which, despite being considered a success, failed at imagining alternative urban developments and reproduced existing exclusions. Finally, besides highlighting some crucial weaknesses underlying the relational perspective, the chapter suggests that a Deleuzean understanding of complexity could help planning to learn from contextual and dynamic features of an unknown complexity and experiment with forms of knowing and acting, learning and imagining, taking into account the many injustices and power games emerging in the making of the city

With the communicative turn in planning theory and the emergence of governance, public participation has become a central issue with respect to inclusionary discourse and the institutionalization of more democratic planning practices. A multitude of participatory planning practices have been implemented with reference to different theoretical perspectives and technical approaches ranging from the traditional to the radical model. Although the current debate about these different participatory activities has brought to the fore an increasing gap between rhetoric and the reality of various models, there are few attempts to compare them in practice. A comparison of participatory activities according to traditional/tokenist and radical models, respectively, should be of interest in the current debate on the crisis of participatory planning and barriers to the institutionalization of participatory planning. This paper discusses tokenist participation in the development planning of Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, Sweden and political activism in a deprived community, Enziteto in Bari, Italy. These two different examples of planner–'community' interaction show the necessity to understand power politics that underlie the ideal of public participation in planning.