New housing development of Warsaw in the context of sustainable design and climate change – city guidelines and recommendations

Residential buildings provide a very important, if not crucial, element of the human living environment. They also constitute one of the basic urban development forms. Therefore, the way housing development is designed bears consequences, including those in the field of sustainable development and climate change, for the entire urban body. Both at the EU, national and local level, decision-makers undertake a number of activities by setting standards for designing cities that take into account the requirements of sustainable development and climate responsible activities. The following paper focuses on selected documents developed for Warsaw in the last few years, in which the importance of the abovementioned issues is emphasized. The analyzed documents set regulations and standards for planning the city, including the design of buildings and housing estates. Document records are analyzed through the prism of sustainable and pro-climate design criteria. The present paper is aimed at specifying guidelines intended for architects, according to which new sustainable housing developments should be designed. Moreover, attempts to evaluate the above guidelines in relation to determinants of the designers’ work are made in the present article