Criteria of Mobility for Sustainable Buildings

Part of the research project “life cycle improvement of the building quality” (“LQG”), financed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and six industry partners is the comparison of sus-tainable building certification systems. This study describes the differences concerning infrastructure and mobility in several building certfication systems for residential buildings: the Austrian klima:aktiv declaration system and Total Quality Building (TQB) certification system are compared with the German Sustainable Building Council (“Deutsches Gütesiegel für Nachhaltiges Bauen”, DGNB), the Swiss MINERGIE-ECO® and with two international systems, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM). It demonstrates how these systems deal with the aspects of infrastructure and mobility, where the deficiencies are and how the criteria could be improved. Moreover, the Swiss leaflet SIA 2039 Mobility – Energy Needs Dependent on Building’s Location (“Mobilität – Energiebedarf in Abhängigkeit vom Gebäudestandort”) is described and applied in its corresponding calculation tool. Infrastructure and mobility is treated differently in all the systems. Some system boundaries simply ignore aspects of mobility for building declarations in order to do it correct in a “scientific way”. Thinking in a holistic way, from the point of sustainability it is clear that a “passive house” or “plus energy house” does not really work if you need lots of energy for mobility by using this building. A building depends completely from the site, it never changes the site. Therefore the system boundaries have to be extended from the building itself to the urban settlement. Examples are discussed.