Measuring the Social Sustainability of New Housing Development: A Critical Review of Assessment Methods

Abstract

Social sustainability is a growing area of debate in the built environment, particularly in relation to housing. Homebuilders in the United Kingdom have responded to organizational and policy drivers by developing ex post assessment frameworks to measure the social sustainability of new housing development. In this paper, I offer a critical perspective of these frameworks by: (1) examining the origins of the concept of social sustainability at the neighborhood level; (2) analyzing the critical challenges and research questions about social sustainability that the underlying methodologies raise; and, (3) how such frameworks might be improved and developed further.

Measuring the Initial Social Sustainability Impacts of Estate Regeneration: A Case Study of Acton Gardens, London

“…2019;1:e190002. https://doi.org/10.20900/jsr20190002 (including those in new and longstanding homes), but did not survey residents living outside the scheme, although the potential value of doing this has also been recognised [1,13].…”

“…This approach is therefore is not as robust as a large-scale longitudinal study would be in tracking detailed changes in communities and individuals (including the potential displacement of residents [13]). This constraint, together with the focus on the early phases of regeneration, therefore meant a detailed displacement analysis of existing residents was not possible during this initial analysis.…”

“…This raises the important issue of displacement of existing residents in such estate regeneration projects. The estate is still (at the time of writing) in the early phases of redevelopment, so it was not possible to examine the displacement of residents in the same detail as other research in this field has done [13,31].…”

“…This is connected with a wider "sense of place" literature, and also the concept of "place-keeping", which highlights the idea of long-term stewardship of housing projects by housebuilders [1,11]. Finally, UK housebuilders are also being driven not only by the need to fulfil corporate responsibility requirements [12], but also the perceived "first mover advantage" in measuring and assessing social sustainability [3,13].…”

“…There has also been a focus on developing a range of "ex ante" assessment tools to measure neighbourhood social sustainability before development has begun (for example, BREEAM Communities) [13,21], but little or no research on measuring social sustainability in new housing projects after construction has begun, or been completed (i.e., "ex post" or "downstream") [8,13].…”