Evaluating and Managing the Energy Transition Towards Truly Sustainable University Campuses

This thesis is about the current role of university campuses to contribute to a fair and sustainable transition towards a low-carbon society. The fundamental argument is that there is a serious gap between the aspiration of higher education institutions in relation to sustainability and the current reality. Whilst formally moving towards sustainability within their curricula and resources management, universities are still immersed in all the complexity, the uncertainty, the scarcity of resources and the leading green-washing paradigm of the cities they are in. This thesis uses the Politecnico di Torino as the main case study, compared with universities in Italy, the UK, Japan, and Mexico, to answer the following questions: (1) What are universities doing in their sustainability efforts that has the potential to be measurable and transferable? And (2) How can we evaluate if universities are truly sustainable? This thesis treats university campuses as small cities nested in bigger cities; heterotopies expressing otherness and maintaining reciprocal relationships within the context. It is proposed that the immediate impacts deriving from educating and practising a wiser use of waste, water, energy and the built environment in universities help to create long term effects toward resilient, fair, and environmentally aware communities. Comparable clusters of universities, bottom-up management schemes and transferrable lessons for the wider urban and global practices are presented and discussed across the different case studies. To facilitate the dialogue between the economic, the social and the environmental fields of action, embedded within university’s sustainability metrics and the attempts to operationalise urban resilience determinants in the campus management, this thesis helps in tailoring appropriate assessment methodologies and operative strategies towards truly sustainable university campuses