HF/E in Protocols for Green Neighborhood and Communities

Abstract

Recently literature is showing follow up studies on green certified buildings, and critical reviews of building sustainability assessment and rating systems. A lot of criticism of current systems are emerging, due to a restricted idea of sustainability, usually limited to the environmental facet. But, although it is accepted that environmental certification protocols at the building scale pay little attention to social dimension of sustainability and, particularly, to ergonomics facets, their recent evolution toward the neighborhood scale is becoming to include social human-related factors issues and participatory practices, since it has been confirmed that they are more capable to pursuit aims of social justice, by enhancing the ethical dimension of design of built environment. The study analyzes main assessment systems of sustainable green neighborhood and communities, by a social point of view, to identify how human related factors, in a wide sense, have been considered in terms of indicators and parameters for assessing sustainability or for informing urban design. Social and human-related factors have been observed considering those influencing both environmental performance both social aspect of sustainability, such as health, safety, inclusivity and quality of life.