Social sustainability assessment framework for managing sustainable construction in residential buildings

Nowadays sustainability concept has gained worldwide recognition in the building industry worldwide. However, despite the recent trends toward consideration of environmental and economic aspects in sustainability assessment framework for buildings, the concept of social sustainability has given less attention. Therefore, social issues were less included in the main categories of sustainability assessment schemes. As a result, such frameworks failed to effectively correspond to social aspects of sustainability and they have created gaps in analytical support necessary for sustainable decision-making. While there are some researches regarding social aspects of sustainability worldwide, investigations are still lacking in developing countries. In order to resolve this issue, this study aims to propose an assessment framework which addresses social sustainability in residential building construction by prioritizing social sustainability criteria based on Iran context. In this research, after exploiting social sustainability indicators, through multi-criteria decision making approach, criteria priorities were obtained with the aid of local experts. Results revealed that among the proposed criteria, local experts considered safety issues as the most important and site considerations and equipment as the least important criterion to be considered in the social sustainability assessment for residential buildings in Iran. After safety issues, performance and flexibility factor was the third-highest important criterion in terms of social sustainability in planning and construction in this country. From the results, it can be concluded that the establishment of social sustainability scheme with a consideration of priorities in a particular country can be a pivotal step forward to provide a responsive sustainability assessment for buildings, especially in developing countries such as in Iran. This research can shed light on the way in which other developing countries customize such social sustainability framework based on their own context to offer decision makers an efficient approach for measuring the social sustainability status of a residential building.