CRISP brings together the work of a carefully selected set of 24 skilled teams that bring to the Network the results achieved in a wide range of national and international projects in this field from across the breadth of Europe. The main activities of the Network are to define a framework and general methodology for construction and city related sustainability indicators, stimulate and co-ordinate the development of such indicators, gather and organise indicators within a database including information on validation, testing and criteria of use, and widely disseminate the results of the research carried out.In order to facilitate the use and uptake of these indicators, dissemination is to take place through a Newsletter, an active Website developed to be useful to the needs of the end users. Regular conferences and meetings will conduct discussions with a range of different target groups.Four sub-areas are to be addressed by four teams or clusters: the product cluster, the building cluster, the urban blocks cluster and the process/strategy cluster.

The Sustainable Construction concept aims at the creation and responsible management of a healthy built environment based on resource efficient and ecological principles. It takes account of environmental and life quality issues, social equity and cultural issues, and economic constraints.Sustainability indicators constitute one of the bottlenecks in moving towards more sustainable construction and cities. Indicators are needed to precisely define sustainability criteria and to measure the performance of the construction industry and the built environment. Decision-makers and policy-makers need indicators to evaluate economically viable and technically feasible strategies to improve the quality of life, whilst at the same time increasing resource use efficiency. Numerous actors in the construction and development process need tools and guidelines based on indicators to improve current practices and the quality of construction.The Network aims to co-ordinate current research work defining and validating such indicators and implementing them to measure the sustainability of construction projects (buildings and built environment) in cities. This includes the activities of identifying and maintaining indicator sets together with implementing them to compare sustainability at a number of levels: individual buildings, large groups of buildings at both the urban and suburban levels as well as for whole urban areas. Implementation in construction activities at the scale of a city, a region or a country is also to be explored.

CRISP aims to develop and validate harmonised criteria and relevant and efficient indicators to measure the sustainability of construction projects particularly within the urban built environment. Through the range of indicators which will be dealt with, the project will contribute to improve the quality of life in urban communities and to promote sustainable development assessed in economic, architecture, environmental, social and cultural terms. Challenges which will be considered through the indicators are for instance linked to the preservation of natural resources, air quality, noise, health and safety, waste, economic competitiveness, employment, deterioration of infrastructure, urban sustainability, environmental loads of construction, socio-cultural aspects etc.Other impacts include also better co-ordination of the development of sustainability indicators for construction and cities, improved consensus on the indicators available and on the criteria of their use, better understanding and application of these indicators by relevant end-users such as planners, developers, designers, standardisation bodies, authorities, contractors and materials producers. These end-users will benefit greatly from an authoritative, relevant and agreed source of information on indicators. It will enable them to develop more appropriate performance targets, tools and standards in order to improve the level of sustainability of the built environment.

CSTB (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment)
France
http://crisp.cstb.fr
Sylviane Nibel

01/01/2001

CSTB (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment)

research

Urban Policy > Housing > Housing quality

Housing design & standards