Exploration of Sustainability in Building Process in China - A Comparison with the Italian Context

“Sustainable building”was proposed by Dr.Charles Cabot in 1993 to illustrate the responsibility of the construction industry in the process of achieving sustainable development. It refers to the building that is planned with a sustainable development concept, including building materials, the size of building, the integration of building within urban areas, etc. It refers more profound to the functional, economic, social-cultural and ecological factors which related to these we mentioned before. As for “building process”, it comprises the entire life cycle of building from project research, building analysis, programming, to the concept generation, detailed design and finally building construction and after all testing and maintaining. As far as the development of China’s construction projects is concerned, in recent years, China’s economic construction has developed rapidly, especially in the context of the country’s policy of expansion of domestic infrastructure to stimulate economic growth, the building companies have received rare opportunities for development. Many construction companies have become bigger and stronger under this favorable policy, and have been greatly expanded in terms of market possession and field development. However, it can’t be denied that the project management of building projects is still affected by the traditional management system and has not adapted to the new economic development environment. The rapid development of the economy and the management mechanism of the construction market have created conflicts which is not easy to be coordinated. Therefore, the problem of implementing modern project management throughout the building process becomes more and more important. This work is trying to find a more refined way to make the building process “sustainable” so that to fix this crucial problem of China. By making comparison with the Italian project, generally speaking making comparison between Chinese and European projects, summing-up different roles of participants within the building process, especially how can different decision makers influence the final result.This analysis helps to find the current problem inside the Chinese building process and provide a kind of solution respect to what Italians did. Sustainable development is a distant goal for China to achieve, this discussion would be one of the paving stones.