ABSTRACT
The growth in the concept of sustainable development threw up a number of new economic, political, environmental and social dimensions at the end of the 1980s, hard on the heels of forecasts of the exhaustion of natural resources and climate change. European construction professionals had to integrate these new ideas into the way they designed and built (see other chapters in Part II). In France, the growth in environmental concerns led to the emergence of new ideas and practices around this issue which, in a fairly unique way, gave rise to the HQE (high environmental quality) movement.
