Developing a residential building-related social sustainability assessment framework and its implications for BIM

Social sustainability is an important component of sustainable housing. A holistic view of social sustainability in residential buildings is lacking when it comes to modern tools and systems of building sustainability assessment, which creates gaps in analytical support necessary for sustainable decision-making. In order to pursue this issue, an assessment framework is proposed that uses a hierarchy of readily assessable sustainability indicators, parameters and sub-indicators. The proposed framework, though qualitative in nature, takes quantitative findings as inputs. It uses a weighted aggregation approach to provide a holistic social sustainability performance value of residential buildings and for determining the weights of indicators, parameters and sub-indicators, the study makes use of survey and structured interviews. Based on findings, the importance of social sustainability in residential and commercial buildings in different regions of world is also explored. A case study comprising of low-rise residential buildings provides an insight into the workability of proposed framework. Furthermore as a minor contribution of this research, the current and futuristic responsiveness of BIM towards social sustainability is explored and its role in use of the proposed framework is investigated.