Are green buildings more liveable than conventional buildings? An examination from the perspective of occupants

Are green buildings more liveable than conventional buildings? An examination from the perspective of occupants

Xu, Ying (Hunan University)
Luo, D. (TU Delft Housing Systems; Hunan University)
Qian, QK (TU Delft Design & Construction Management)
Chan, Edwin Hon Wan (Hunan University)

2022

In response to excessive energy consumption and severe pollution, green building has gained increasing attention around the world. Governments’ top-down incentive schemes and consumers’ bottom-up choice preferences are two major channels of residential green building promotion. Regarding the bottom-up route, high liveability performance is critical to ensuring that occupants are willing to make secondary purchases or provide recommendations. Therefore, this paper, using post-occupancy evaluation, aims to evaluate and compare the liveability performance of green and conventional buildings from the perspectives of occupants. The results verified that the eco-label effect (i.e., subjective differences for building types) influenced the occupants’ evaluations of building performance. When controlling for eco-label bias, we found that green buildings were not superior to conventional buildings in terms of liveability. This is highly relevant to evaluations of the orientation of green building certifications that concentrate on the consumption of energy and material resources but neglect the living experience of occupants. In addition, indicators related to thermal comfort (e.g., indoor temperature or frequency of air conditioner use) played an important role in the occupants’ liveability evaluations. These findings provide concrete guidance regarding how the evaluation systems of green building certifications in various countries should be upgraded in the near future.

Eco-label effect
Green building
Liveability performance
Post-occupancy evaluation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b0889aa6-fba5-4590-816c-f5587f88049f

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-022-09983-9

2023-04-14

1566-4910

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 38 (2023) (2), 1047-1066

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

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© 2022 Ying Xu, D. Luo, QK Qian, Edwin Hon Wan Chan