‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

So how do we think outside the box to create reversible building design?
To move toward sustainability, a building, city or settlement should improve its biophysical context 
– well beyond the building, product or the ‘box’ as defined by the investment. Buildings should 
be seen as an opportunity to create positive environments that remedy some of the deficiencies of 
surrounding development. Improving the ecological conditions of the site and wider region will 
require a new approach to planning, design and assessment: one that looks beyond the inputs and 
outputs of the region, the building envelope, and components and/or materials. Designers need to 
look at total environmental flows through the existing or proposed development [Chapter 6]. At 
the same time, they need to look at flows between the development and the surrounding region and 
natural environment [Chapter 8]. To build capacity in design for sustainability, then, we need 
design
tools that:
•
Analyse and identify specific economic, social and ecological problems in the urban and
regional context that development can correct through positive on-site and off-site impacts
• 
Facilitate collaborative processes that encourage creativity and innovation in design for eco- 
services aimed at value adding to the public estate and ecological base
Here we will review some of the conceptual and practical problems of rating tools and project review 
and approval processes. Then we will look at a proposal for front-loading the design and planning 
process. This is intended to drive self-education in eco-innovation, reduce compliance costs and 
reward those who create positive impacts. It should also help us to focus on creating better futures, 
by being less retrospective and more future oriented.
How are rating tools retrospective rather than future oriented?
To assess or rate something, it has to exist – at the very least in the mind. Creating a sustainable 
built environment is not a hi-tech problem. However, we need to create something that does not 
yet exist. Instead of waiting for experts to tell us how much further we can go before we cross over 
thresholds, we could simply take action to reverse direction. The growing raft of complex rating tools 
obscure the very idea that we could reverse ecological decline through design.
5
They also do little for 
paradigm shifts or capacity building in design. We noted how poor systems design is 
inbuilt
, so simply 
improving producer and consumer education, values and behaviour will not sustain our threatened 
life-support systems [Chapter 1]. At the same time, tools that make ‘design’ a specialized technocratic 
process, instead of a creative one, tend to dis-empower the citizenry. A sustainable future will require 
aligning our human-designed systems of development (ie built and institutional infrastructure) with 
local, regional and global ecosystems. This will also require capacity building in eco-logical design.
Most building assessment tools simply measure the ‘generalized’ future impacts of a building typology 
or material. They do not facilitate consideration of the ecological and social context, and how it can 
be improved by design. Because we lack methods to assist design innovations that prevent, reverse 
or replace negative with positive impacts in development, however, our increasingly sophisticated 
toys are often called ‘design tools’ by default. This has caused some to overlook the fact that we lack 
tools that foster ecological design.
6
Tools that evaluate building 
forms
appear to inform design, but 
do so based on conventional building typologies, not ecological functions. Moreover, if we only have 
technical, predictive tools, we will not develop our creative skills, only our technical capacity.

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Building Rating Tools