Sustainable development is the need of the hour today. For over three decades, since the term was used in public little has been done about it. Such important activities for the protection of our ecosystem have been mainly discussed at scientific conferences or in the comfort of academic lecture halls. Successive global crises, especially the ecological, economic, financial and now humanitarian one related to the COVID-19 pandemic have demolished global economies, sidelined the development of a sustainable economy and especially sustainable construction, treating it more as a whim of the rich than expedience. The construction sector accounts for up to 40 per cent of the global carbon dioxide emissions and generates more than 0.5 billion tonnes of waste every year. However, when it comes to improving macroeconomic indicators after another crisis, the easiest way to look for savings is to use the production of emerging markets, without considering their lower economic and environmental awareness. Each time, the lust for profit prevailed over environmental protection. Education, business, and institutional factors failed, as indicated in the conclusions. That was the case until November 17, 2019, when the first man was infected with the coronavirus. Will we draw the right conclusions from that while facing a crisis unprecedented in human history? Can we change priorities from having to being?

This paper presents a novel approach to sustainable urban revitalization. Care Spaces are defined, and an area selected for revitalization is described. Transformation of city space is of fundamental importance for everyday life, its comfort as regards the functional aspect as well as the psychological and cultural ones. The presented projects are in accord with 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the conception of Baukultur. Both approaches tend to create well designed environment that support health and well-being of people and other living creatures while taking into account cultural aspects in design and construction. Focusing on the combination of soundscape analysis with design elements. To monitor the soundscape, a custom database of urban sound recordings was constructed, and key analytical methods such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), feature extraction, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and permutation of feature importance were applied. The effectiveness of these algorithms was confirmed through field investigations.

The building sector plays a key role in the transition toward climate neutrality, with national regulations across the EU requiring the construction of nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEBs). However, while energy performance has been extensively studied, less attention has been given to the problem of ensuring user comfort—both indoors and in the surrounding outdoor areas—under nZEB design constraints. This gap raises two key research objectives: (1) to evaluate whether a well-designed nZEB with extensive glazing maintains acceptable indoor thermal comfort and (2) to assess whether residents experience greater outdoor thermal comfort and satisfaction in small, sun-exposed private gardens or in larger, shaded communal green spaces. To address these objectives, a newly built residential estate near Kraków (Poland) was analyzed. The investigation included simulation-based assessments during the design phase and in situ measurements during building operation, complemented by a user survey on spatial preferences. Indoor comfort was evaluated for rooms with large glazed façades, as well as rooms with standard-sized windows, while outdoor comfort was assessed in both private gardens and a shared green courtyard. Results show that shading the southwest-oriented glazed façade with an overhanging terrace provided slightly lower temperatures in ground-floor rooms compared to rooms with standard unshaded windows. Outdoors, users experienced lower thermal comfort in small, unshaded gardens than in the larger, vegetated communal area (pocket park), which demonstrated greater capacity for temperature moderation and thermal stress reduction. Survey responses further indicate that potential future residents prefer the inclusion of a shared green–blue infrastructure area, even at the expense of building some housing units in semi-detached form, instead of maximizing the number of detached units with unshaded individual gardens. These findings emphasize the importance of addressing both indoor and outdoor comfort in residential nZEB design, showing that technological efficiency must be complemented by user-centered design strategies. This integrated approach can improve the well-being of residents while supporting climate change adaptation in the built environment.

This paper presents a comparative study on the transdisciplinary design of resilient urban subcenters, examining the interplay between human-led and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated design approaches. By employing holistic design methods, we prepare and present revitalization projects for two areas of urban space. Our goal was to create a resilient urban subcenter that contributes to the development of a resident. The first revitalized site reflects the multicultural past of the city. The second project addresses the need to revitalize a subcenter reserved for residents. In the non-AI approach, holistic design is implemented across various universities, fields, and academic disciplines—the humanities, social sciences, engineering, and the arts. Transdisciplinary teams of sociologists, engineers, interior designers, architects, urban geographers, and acousticians transcend workshop limitations as well as cognitive boundaries, promoting the creation of new, unconventional knowledge. The AI-integrated approach employs artificial intelligence in a dual capacity: both as a generator of alternative design visions and as an analytical tool for assessing technological readiness. The findings contribute to the evolving discourse on sustainable urban development and the transformative potential of technology in transdisciplinary design practices.

The introduction presents a brief historical outline of the development of higher education in Poland, starting with the Krakow Academy, focusing on the recent history, and discussing the achievements of the 1970s in more detail. It was an important period for the architecture of universities, which, after a short time of socialist realism, began to draw from the experiences of modernism. The main topic of the study is the architecture created after 2004, after Poland joined the European Union. A rapid increase in investment in higher education infrastructure was observed at that time, by some referred to as a construction boom at Polish universities. Over the decade, a large part of the existing assets was modernized, and several dozen new investments were completed. The article describes the achievements of this period, focusing first on the analysis of the architecture of individual buildings, and then assessing the quality of recently completed campuses in terms of their design, composition and spatial form. Architectural achievements at Polish universities are compared with examples of academic buildings and campuses from Western Europe and with contemporary trends in the design of academic campuses.

Since 2021, the design and construction of nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEBs) have been mandatory for European Union Member States. Subsequent requirements for the building sector, characterized by high energy demand and significant environmental impact, include the minimization of carbon footprint and the introduction of climate-neutral building standards. The carbon footprint comprises both embodied emissions related to materials and construction processes and operational emissions resulting from building use. This paper analyzes both types of carbon footprint using a residential building that is part of an experimental housing estate consisting of 44 semi-detached buildings as a case study. Analyses of energy consumption optimization and carbon footprint reduction were conducted at both the individual building scale and the scale of the entire housing complex. The estate was developed in two stages. In the first stage (completion of construction in 2024), the primary criterion for technology selection was investment cost while maintaining compliance with applicable technical and building regulations. Prior to the implementation of the second stage, the investor conducted a social participation process in the form of a survey among future users. The survey addressed environmental aspects of the newly designed buildings and enabled the selection of materials, technologies, and energy sources aligned with user preferences. The results indicate that environmental aspects are important to future users; however, investment decisions are strongly balanced against economic factors. At the same time, the energy analyses demonstrate that a substantial reduction in the operational carbon footprint can be achieved, enabling a significant progression toward climate neutrality, both at the level of individual buildings and across the entire housing estate. Social participation, therefore, becomes an important element in the pursuit of climate neutrality in buildings. However, it must be taken into account already at the design stage. The results of the analyses carried out in the article showed that, taking into account public participation in the design process and user recommendations, the selected optimal variant (W5) allows for a reduction in the EP index by over 90% compared to the variant based on standard low-cost solutions (W0) (EP (W0) = 243.64 kWh/(m² year); EP (W5) = 18.42 kWh/(m² year). In terms of the embodied carbon footprint, the optimal option W5 allows for a reduction of over 30% in the embodied carbon footprint of the building structure (W0—51,585.32 [kgCO₂e]; W5—35,537.87 [kgCO₂e]). The optimal variant indicated by users (W5) allows for a reduction in the operational carbon footprint by approximately 80% compared to the basic variant (W0): W0—604,189.50 [kgCO₂e/kWh]; W5—247,402.0 [kgCO₂e/kWh]. The results obtained indicate that public participation is not only a complementary element of the design process, but it can also be a key component of the decarbonisation strategy in residential construction. Involving future users in the decision-making process increases the likelihood of achieving long-term greenhouse gas emission reductions and supports the implementation of long-term climate policy goals.