Developing a conceptual framework for assessing the socio-economic benefits of regeneration projects in the UK

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed the evolution of building assessment methods for appraising the sustainability performance of building projects. In the UK for instance, the Government has initiated a number of assessment/evaluation methods to deal with some of the environmental problems associated with regeneration programmes. But attempts aimed at implementing sustainability assessment primarily have been limited to the environmental impact of buildings, with the socio-economic aspects often neglected. The findings of an exploratory case study on a housing regeneration project, which adopted a combination of literature review and focus-group interview approach with eight key stakeholders for data collection in the UK, are presented in this paper. The emergent framework developed and presented in hierarchical order in this paper incorporates project level and wider community socio-economic sustainability indicators.