Understanding the Role of Standards in the Negotiation of a Healthy Built Environment

Abstract

A growing number of international standards promote Healthy Built Environment (HBE) principles which aim to enhance occupant and user health and wellbeing. Few studies examine the implementation of these standards; whether and how they affect health through changes to built-environment design, construction, and operations. This study reviews a set of sustainability and HBE standards, based on a qualitative analysis of standard documents, standard and socio-technical literature on normalization and negotiation, and interviews with 31 practitioners from four geographical regions. The analysis indicates that standards can impact individual, organizational, and market-scale definitions of an HBE. Some changes to practice are identified, such as procurement and internal layout decisions. There is more limited evidence of changes to dominant, short-term decision-making practices related to cost control and user engagement in operational decisions. HBE standards risk establishing narrow definitions of health and wellbeing focused on building occupants rather than promoting broader, contextually situated, principles of equity, inclusion, and ecosystem functioning crucial for health. There is a need to improve sustainability and HBE standards to take better account of local contexts and promote systems thinking. Further examination of dominant collective negotiation processes is required to identify opportunities to better embed standards within organizational practice.

Identifying barriers to engage with soundscape standards: Insights from national standards bodies and experts

“…It is increasingly used in the built environment sector to examine the normalization process of various environmental standards responding to climate crisis and human wellbeing. For example, looking at ways to normalize healthy building design, Callway et al (2020) applied the NPT to analyze how stakeholders describe and evaluate their intentions of applying specific sustainability standards (i.e., BREAM and LEED) and healthrelated standards (i.e., WELL Building and WELL Communities) in different projects.…”

Integrating Health into Local Plans: A Comparative Review of Health Requirements for Urban Development in Seven Local Planning Authorities in England

“…Such recommendations are important to give developers a clear indication of the baseline good practice that they are expected to refer to, regarding key built environment attributes that have peer-reviewed evidence of health benefits. It should be noted, however, that a planning requirement to seek certification of a voluntary standard does not necessarily guarantee the implementation and monitoring of those principles at the construction and in-use phases of a development [20,25,26]. As such, area three of the review (see Section 3.3) sought to address some of the key risks regarding this potential implementation gap.…”