By placing oneself at the joint between architecture and urbanism, the sustainability approach at the neighborhood scale allows to take into account criteria more important than just at the building scale and corresponds more particularly in a reorientation movement of a building towards the interior, particularly by the creation and the reinforcement of dense and mixed-use centers in the proximity of public transportation.
The Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) research works in the field of neighborhoods in transition aim in particular on the exploration of forward-looking visions, the development of indicator systems specifically adapted to the neighborhood scale, the improvement of urban integrated design process, the study of modalities allowing a neighborhood to be compatible with higher sustainable objectives (for example those of the 2000 Watts society), and the optimization of decisional processes favoring the integration of sustainability.
