Eco-Design or Eco-Innovation? The Case of the Building Sector

The aim of this paper is to explore the concepts of eco-design and eco-innovation in the context of smart cities. In terms of impacts, the two approaches are considered to be sustainable solutions that imply finding the right balance between ecological and economic requirements by maximizing sustainability throughout all the stages of the product development process. However, despite the complementarities of their impacts, the two concepts are not clear in terms of targets and mechanisms. The aim of this article is to discuss these differences within the building and construction sector in the context of smart cities. We argue that the development of smart cities is closely linked to the context of sustainable development and therefore the strategy related to the integration of environmental considerations into the design stage is determinant when engineering the buildings and selecting the materials. In order to investigate empirically the understanding of the two concepts among professionals, we use a media content analysis. Within the LexisNexis database, we selected European professional magazines from the environment, construction and building categories published in English, French and German languages over the period 2005-2015. Our results are threefold: first, there is a predominant use of the eco-design compared to the eco-innovation concept; second, there is a strong difference between English and French professional magazine articles, the latter discussing eco-design much more often than the first; and finally, the range of discussed eco-design mechanisms and impacts got slowly broader since 2012. We discuss the results and try to explain them according to the evolution of the regulation in this field.