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Abstract
This article offers a review of the scientific literature aimed at putting forward a proposal on the main variables or categories of sustainable design to take into consideration to manage, plan, design, build and maintain buildings in Mexico. The methodology consisted in reviewing 5 successfully tried international green building models (rating systems), from which a series of requirements by sustainable category were taken in order to propose categories and variables proper to the Mexican context. The result was a checklist that comprises sustainable design requirements broken down by categories: natural, human, technologic and economic to apply in the Mexican context. It is concluded that successfully tried green building international models such as: LEED®, BREAM®, CASBEE®, ESTIDAMA® or Green Star® can be very useful to manage, plan, design and construct sustainable buildings around the world.
Keywords: Environmental rating systems; Green building; Environmental design requirements; Low carbon architecture.
1.INTRODUCTION
At present, Mexico does not have a rating system on green building which has been tried or with the potential to solve environmental problems derived from the design, construction, use, maintenance, operability and end of service life of buildings and urban infrastructure, both in the professional and academic sphere.
New scientific knowledge and tools for the transmission of knowledge must be produced in Mexico to actually be able to (academically) educate and (professionally) train urbanists and architects to develop sustainable cities and urban settlements that respond to the current and developmental needs of any country around the world (Hernández-Moreno, 2009: 138).
Governmental authorities must be directly in charge of establishing more efficacious mechanisms and programs, for instance in renewable energies at urban level (Zamfir, 2014), improvement of environmental regulations by sector (forest, food, real estate, industrial, etc.), in public and private spheres that regulate the environmental impacts that promote local and regional sustainable development with a global impact (Hernández-Moreno and Núñez-Vera, 2014) aided by methods and models more efficacious for such objectives.
Recently, in 2013, the Mexican norm NMX-AA-164-SCFI-2013, regarding green building, was issued. It contains baseline criteria and minimal environmental requirements. This norm is an important endeavor to regulate planning, design and construction of buildings, but which on its own, it is not sufficient to align the full cycles of the buildings toward integral sustainability....