ABSTRACT: The built environment composed of planning, design, management and maintenance impacts upon people and cities. The paper discusses contents of two documents about policies and strategies for a sustainable built environment. One reports guidelines to sustainability assessment tools (1), publication dated 2008. The other treats
aspects of sustainable building in Brazil and lines to promote national policies (2) publication date 2014. The methodology privileges the interdisciplinary qualitative studies about environment, ecology, sustainability, economy and sociology through linguistic discourse analysis. The discourse is not confined to sentences but the sentences bring adduced meaning regarding different contexts. It’s true that the discourse presents relationships between structure (pattern) and function (social, functions of language). The built environment composed of planning, design, management and maintenance impacts upon people and cities. In document 1, building construction studies definitions started with a research in which participated the construction activity actors – planners, surveyors, architects, engineers. The focus performed three main lines: water, energy and building materials. Even though document 2 doesn’t mention this kind of method to choose the text contents, it contains the same matters. Both documents written by federations, committees, councils, house chambers, offices, bring new demands for local authorities to progress towards the sustainability of the building stock. Among the main results despite of quantitative differences – tables, graphics, figures – in both documents it occurs the same qualitative phenomenon approach: the planet limits; the environmental degradation and waste (in Brazil represents 50% of natural resources extraction, 1.5% of the GDP in 2013); range of measures on industry to innovate the sector; informal labor, illegal business; and water, energy and building material sustainability.