International healthy built environment standards have emerged over the last decade as a key trend in property development, including WELL and Fitwel. As these standards are different to the more established sustainability standards, e.g. BREEAM and LEED, we held interviews with developers, planners, residents, and design teams to understand how they perceive and apply built environment standards.
There are some challenges with the implementation of healthy built environment standards that we wanted to understand in more detail. For instance, although there is some evidence that these standards may improve occupant health, real estate values, and development quality, there may be a lack of sophistication in their implementation meaning that the adopted standard does not achieve as much benefit as could otherwise be realised on the specific development. Policy-makers may have difficulty understanding the distinction between alternative standards or frameworks, specifically how they define and target health and sustainability intentions. Furthermore, developers may not fully comply with standards and some negative health impacts could be created if integrated design measures are not used.
This paper concludes with two calls to action, first that ‘standards need to better address the processes of negotiation that take place at different times and places in a project cycle’ and second, that ‘there is a need to encourage applicants to move on from principally using standards to legitimise existing practice, towards seeing standards as strategic tools that should promote internal reflection and responses to healthy built environments and wider sustainability objectives’.
I looked into the history of how standards can push innovation in the construction sector when I worked at the BRE. The Building Research Establishment is a not-for-profit organisation in the UK that created the BREEAM standard (BRE Environmental Assessment Method). This video from the Construction Climate Challenge conference in 2015 tells the story of BREEAM standards in particular.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors commissioned an insight report on ‘Cities, Health and Well-being’. The report explains how urban environments can affect both health and wellbeing in different settings.
Readers will find the following topics:
An introduction to health in cities, including key urban health trends of increasing chronic diseases and physical inactivity
An overview of urban environment factors that affect health
International examples of urban planning policies and new development that have integrated health considerations
A comparison and overview of building standards that relate to health, particularly the WELL Building Standard and Fitwel
Discussion of the financial value and cost of achieving healthy places
A set of top tips for getting started (aimed at built environment professionals).
An international research network launched a report on their research of over 43 urban sustainability frameworks at a conference in London last Friday.(1) BRE’s sustainability standard for masterplans was included in the research and I was asked to present in a panel session about whether the quantity and variation of assessment frameworks was problematic or useful. The research showed that 34 out of the 43 frameworks were published between 2008 and 2013 leaving me to wonder why and how this focus on standards, benchmarking and assessment has grown so dramatically. Why are people measuring urban sustainability and who should be trusted with this task?
Standards serve multiple functions and depending on the nature of the standard, can have benefits for industry, government and citizens (or consumers if we’re talking about products or houses). The Top Dog standard for sustainable cities is considered to be ISO 37210:2014 Sustainable Development of Communities: Indicators for City Services and Quality of Life. A panel discussion in a Liveable Cities Singapore conference last October asked why this standard is used. Terry Hill, ISO President and former Chairman of Arup Group, said that it ‘is both “comprehensive” and “comparable”, enabling a method to compare cities as diverse as Mumbai and Manchester.’(2) Although comparison would only be possible if both cities had data for the same indicators (outside of the core indicators) and reported on these in a publicly accessible manner. Increasingly, I think cities will seek to publish these results in response to increased citizen demand for transparency from government. International comparisons are great for major cities that are looking to compete for talent and investment internationally. But that is not the only reason to measure urban sustainability.
Arguably, a more important reason to gather appropriate data and benchmark performance is for the city’s own use in checking whether its policies and services are meeting local needs. Sustainability indicators can be used by cities to inform and monitor policies and investment priorities. All of the following reasons are also relevant (taken from a scoping report on developing a UK Health Poverty Index (3) with some explanation from me in brackets):
‘bidding for cash grants and special status
support and context for clinical governance [or governance of other services]
broad population health measurement [or measurement of other factors]
targeting services
resource allocation
examination of rural poverty [and urban]
monitoring and evaluation
performance management
visualisation of the extent and contrasts of deprivation in geographical areas using mapping and graphical analyses’ [or other factors]
When it comes to the scale of neighbourhoods, similar data and indicators are useful to understand and examine sustainability. BREEAM Communities (and its international competitors like LEED Neighbourhood Development) are focused on guiding the design of new development to be more sustainable. BREEAM Communities aims to improve the process of planning and designing a new community, including: involving the community and relevant stakeholders in design; considering sustainability holistically; and creating transparency about developer commitments on sustainability. It was odd to me that these frameworks were compared in the wider research with city sustainability indices like Siemens’ Green City Index which appear to be more of a marketing tool for the company’s services than a framework to help cities improve performance.
Many international consultancies and technology providers have introduced sustainability/smart city indices. I note that apart from IBM and Siemens, these are not listed in the research:
Sustainable Cities Index, ARCADIS
Green City Index, Siemens
Smart City Assessment Tool, IBM
City Resilience Framework, Arup (supported by Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities)
Disaster Resilience Scorecard for cities, AECOM/IBM
New Resource Economy City Index, Accenture and Chinese Academy of Science (CAS)
Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook, ATKearney
Innovation Cities Index, 2thinknow
These indices or frameworks may fall on a spectrum of transparency and usability by city management. Judging by the press coverage of ARCADIS’s recently launched Sustainable Cities Index, these are powerful marketing and PR tools. And further inferring from the cost of investment in developing these indices, I imagine that they are also very useful for selling consulting services, infrastructure and technology.
As a conference panellist, I concluded that these frameworks have multiple purposes and are used by cities, planners, developers (etc.) for various reasons. Depending on the objective under question, multiplicity can be problematic or irrelevant. One delegate asked during a plenary session whether the research team still believes in urban sustainability frameworks. Following amusement from the audience and speakers, the response was generally supportive of the tools but encouraged international collaboration of independent organisations to look at reducing the number.
Tomorrow’s City Today: Prospects for Standardising Sustainable Urban Development conference speakers
References
1. Simon Joss, Robert Cowley, Martin de Jong, Bernhard Müller, Buhm Soon Park, William Rees, et al. Tomorrow’s City Today: Prospects for Standardising Sustainable Urban Development. London: University of Westminster; 2015.
2. Centre for Liveable Cities Lecture Series. Of Standards and Cities. Singapore: Centre for Liveable Cities Singapore; 2014 Oct.
3. Dibben C, Sims A, Noble M, Hill A, Goldacre M, Surrender R, et al. Health Poverty Index Scoping Project [Internet]. Oxford: University of Oxford and South East Public Health Observatory; 2001 [cited 2015 May 20]. Available from: http://www.sepho.org.uk/Download/Public/5355/1/hpi_report.pdf
The long awaited Housing Standards Review Consultation was published today and we are none the wiser as to how government will achieve its aims without compromising the quality of new housing in the UK. The consultation showed:
government’s continued tension between the localism agenda and the need to set (slash) policy at a national level to provide certainty to developers;
a lack of consideration for new homebuyers/occupants and the costs they will pay if standards are removed;
potential additional burdens for local plan preparation; and
The jury is out in Britain about whether or not we should have standards for housing. This is because the current government is all about cutting red tape. The term ‘standard’ can be ambiguous. Depending on the context, ‘standards’ could mean principles of quality or requirements (as in ‘she has high standards when it comes to men’). Or ‘standards’ could be interpreted as quasi-regulations (as in ‘we could have avoided the horse meat scandal if we had tougher standards for the food supply chain’). According to Scott Steedman, Director of Standards at the British Standards Institute, BSI standards are about knowledge. They shouldn’t be interpreted as regulations, benchmarks or specifications. So if standards aren’t benchmarks and specifications do we need them to achieve decent quality homes? And if the answer is no, what do we need? Continue reading “Do standards achieve higher quality homes?”
The development industry in Norway and Sweden is not as hesitant as we are to try something new. In the UK we talk a lot about sustainable urbanism but developers are slow to act. The expertise exists in the architecture and design profession but there is a reticence from developers to change the way they work. It’s not just about cost, though many are quick to point to viability as the reason why we can’t achieve true sustainable development. In Scandinavia there is real interest in trying out a tool like BREEAM Communities*.
Hammarby Sjostad, Stockholm on a cold evening in November.
It would be easy to make unfair comparisons between the UK and Scandinavian countries about sustainability that don’t tell the full story. Yes, the Scandinavians are good at design. And they have the iconic sustainable community projects to prove it, like Hammarby in Stockholm. But they have the same difficulties that we have when it comes to masterplanning; and they are very willing to try a new approach (even though it is from the UK) to overcome these. Continue reading “Are the Scandinavians looking to Britain for advice on developing sustainable communities?”
Social housing crammed into a corner behind executive homes on ‘The Hamptons’, one of the four developments in The Berkeley Group’s report. Does this lead to social sustainability?
The Berkeley Group recently published Part 1 of a Social Sustainability framework. It provides a list of social sustainability indicators and compares four Berkeley developments with other ‘comparable areas’. This is a great initiative and the efforts should be praised; but the framework does not yet provide enough depth and rigour for others to make use of it. The research finding that first roused my suspicions was in regards to high-density developments.
When was the last time you read up on the Code for Sustainable Homes? A few years ago? Never? There is a lot of bad information floating around the planning world about how England is going to reduce carbon emissions through the Code for Sustainable Homes. For the uninitiated, the Code (for short) is a sustainable building standard for new homes and most planners (and planning inspectors) hold a lot of misconceptions about it.
Misconceptions abound because reducing carbon emissions from buildings costs money and everybody has something to say about it. But also because it’s a very technical area and not many planners have the background or time to question the information they receive on this topic.
