Developing a social sustainability assessment framework

Green building appraisal tool evaluates, enhance and promote the level of sustainable development in the built environment. However, with a focus on the social criteria, the context of the building assessment tool has remained unexamined. Moreover, since a large number of green building evaluation tool, has been established throughout the years, there is by all accounts a significant lacuna in the classification and estimation of the investigation of social criteria in building assessment tools. Therefore, the study aims at developing a social criteria framework, supported by categories and indicators to evaluate sustainable development in buildings. The set of categories and indicators were proposed based on the adoption of LEED working sheet. Against the background, the study is organized by adopting Delphi techniques and interviews for building users. In doing so, a two-round questionnaire was responded to by qualified experts to help in the selection of key categories and indicators that support the evaluation of social criteria for GBAT. Also, the use of Analytic Hierarchy Process was employed to find the most relevant measurement and weight for the resulting indicators and categories. The findings will contribute to building practitioners in order to evaluate building projects socially, with a focus to attain sustainable development in the built environment.