La gestione della qualità ambientale e gli eco-regolamenti edilizi - Environmental quality management and eco-building regulations

The Italian municipalities have taken only the first steps on the road to smart cities. By 2020 thanks to the European Community and the Mayors agreement in 2008, cities aiming to be smart (for energy management,transport, digital technologies, social policy) will focus on sustainable development, by innovations and adequate partners. The general goal of resource saving and use of renewable energy has become a strategic necessity, fully involving architecture, whose environmental load in industrialized countries has become unsustainable. The national regulatory framework is constantly evolving, because the new European Directive 31/2010/CE, repealing the E.D. 91/2002/CE, obliges from January 2021 energy consumption close to zero for all new buildings. Objectives can only be achieved with the contribution of all actors of the building process and the use of effective tools for management and control of environmental quality, associated with the construction activity. Within this framework planning and building tools are essential, whose regulatory strategies are also activated at the regional scale. In Italy, many regions have begun to address the problem, for which there is a wide range of regional regulations and building regulation (R.E.) where sustainability criteria were introduced, assigning volume premiums or economic incentives, aimed at promoting the reduction of energy consumption. The paper presents the first results of the research, aimed to produce guidelines, useful for eco-building regulations, for the Sicilian regional context, such as basic regulation instruments of constructive activity, oriented towards sustainability, with the support of environmental assessment criteria. After a survey on the state of the more virtuous municipal building regulations, the energy and environmental legislation, the good practices such as eco-districts, it was possible to define the framework of parameters characterizing on which elaborating the building intervention, with high energy and environmental significance, the sustainable and interested thematic areas, aims, actions and possible interventions.