Sustainability in Campus Building Design from Micro to Macro Scale

Abstract

This study investigates the criteria for sustainable campus actions and their tangible outcomes in university campuses, which are considered as a small-scale form of cities in terms of their environmental impacts. To contextualize these findings, the term ‘sustainability’ is employed as a holistic reference basis. The widely used sustainable campus criteria were analyzed together with the sample cases from the campus sustainable performance indicators. The cases were selected from different universities all around the world. As a result of the evaluations made with the help of the data, the meta-analysis table was created and suggestions for future studies were provided especially for promoting sustainable campus applications. On the other hand, negative factors in the process are that applicable indicators are not widely adopted by users in many campuses. These factors have revealed that indicators that require investment and infrastructure costs such as renewable energy production, wastewater recycling and rainwater harvesting are not very actively involved in daily life. The failure of campuses to achieve sustainability goals in terms of physical and systematically relationships lead to the architect’s failure to determine the sustainable campus design indicators and to construct the whole. Therefore, it is understood that in the sustainable design of campuses, architects should clearly determine the campus indicators, and the entire design should be created based on the indicators. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.