The Significant Indicators for the Assessment of Social Sustainability in Housing

Sustainable development is becoming an issue of critical importance in the past three decades in every respect, especially in architectural and urban design. Its focus was initially limited to the environment, but it gradually developed to encompass economic and social dimensions. There is a need to develop a clearer understanding of the social pillar of sustainable development. Accordingly, this paper’s focus is on social sustainability. The purpose of the research is to find out the effective indicators on improving social sustainability in housing. Initially, data collection was carried out through a literature review on the subjects related to the areas of urban planning, architecture, and residential environments. In the current study, the codes, themes and categories were obtained using content analysis techniques on the collected data. Through examining a broad range of references obtained from the results of the search, key candidate indicators influencing social sustainability, which appeared most frequently in the literature were identified and classified into five main components. Following the identification of the candidate criteria, the Delphi technique was used to validate the proposed framework. The study presented here comprised two questionnaire rounds sent to panel members. The experts were selected from people with substantial knowledge in the field of housing and residential neighbourhood planning and design. They were from a pool of academics in environmental design and residential design. The experts were asked to rank the importance of each indicator, to provide suggestions on how to improve the framework and to suggest criteria not listed. Following revisions resulting from the comments received from the first round, the respondents were also asked to repeat the assessment in the second round. The findings showed that the "physical desirability" and "social and cultural life" are the most significant aspects for improving social sustainability. Also, the indicators of "social security", "social participation" and "social interactions" from social and cultural life category were the most influential indicators with mean values of 3.675, 2.904, and 1.527, respectively. Based on the experts' opinion, "inclusive design", "pedestrian-cantered/ bicycle-friendly land uses", and "spatial diversity and liveability" from the physical desirability category were the most crucial indicators for social sustainability with mean values of 1.322, 1.300, and 1.252, respectively.