WHAT’S NEW FOR UNDERSTANDING AND MANAGING PEOPLE’S USE OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT?

SCOPE: Cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and produce 70% of global CO2 emissions, mainly due to construction activities and buildings’ functioning. Urbanization is one of the great challenges of this century, therefore the development of sustainable strategies to manage (and reduce) energy and natural resources demand in buildings is urgent. The way people use buildings plays a central role. Building performances are impacted by how people utilize spaces, maintain them, and adapt them to their changing needs. Today ranges of technological tools make it relatively easy to understand how users’ behaviours occur into buildings and cities, and to inform people’s interactions with the built environment. However, only few studies investigate users’ behaviours in buildings, and consider them in environmental models. Thus, it is interesting to understand how sensors and digital tools can help to reduce buildings’ impact by informing, on one hand, the end-users and, on the other, developers, building owners, and facility managers. With the aim to fill this gap, the objectives of this study are to: a) Map available tools, methods and data, including the scale of their application; b) Detect the extent to which tools, methods, and data integrate with one another, and evaluate new information that can be obtained by matching them; and c) Figure out the involved actors: who plays a role in data collection and analysis? Who produces data? METHODS: Through a literature review, the paper compares existing tools and methods for data gathering on space utilization and user behaviour, in particular: a) The most diffused technological/digital tools for space utilization analysis; and b) The most diffused approaches/methods for energy and resource consumption analysis (i.e. Life Cycle Assessment, Ecological Footprint, and Post Occupancy Evaluation). These are analysed by: the data they rely on, their scale-up potential (from different types of buildings, to cities and territories), the actors involved in their application, and the beneficiary of the information produced. RESULTS AND PROVISIONAL CONCLUSIONS: Results will show the extent to which different data and methods can be matched to obtain novel insights. It will be discussed how this match can advance extant models to manage users’ behaviours toward reducing energy consumption. The article drafts possible protocols of data collection and analysis that can be applied at different scales, and that will involve different stakeholders. This study has the potential to encourage the digitalization of built environment products and processes, which can support real estate management strategies and responsible users’ behaviours. Potentially, these could be expanded to the urban scale, through urban planning and crowd management models.