Akotia, J and Fortune, C (2012) Early stage evaluation of the socio-economic benefits of built environment housing regeneration projects. In: Smith, S D (ed.) Proceedings of 28th Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2012, Edinburgh, UK.
Abstract
In recent years, sustainable regeneration has been recognized as being of major economic and social concern in the world. In the UK for instance, government has initiated a number of policies and evaluation methods to deal with some of the environmental problems associated with regeneration projects. However, the post construction evaluation of these projects has often resulted in them being seen as not achieving their set objectives. Attempts aimed at evaluating the implementation of sustainability by built environment professionals have primarily been limited to their assessment of the projects' potential environmental impacts with the associated socio-economic aspects being neglected. While there have been a number of studies on sustainability and its evaluation in relation to regeneration projects in the UK, there has not been any well-defined built environment research that has been able to deal holistically with the broader issues of sustainability in terms of benefits/impacts of the regeneration projects to the end-user and the communities concerned. The findings of an exploratory study that adopted a semi-structured interviews approach for data collection from six senior regeneration managers of construction industry organizations involved in housing regeneration projects in the UK are presented in this paper. The findings reveal a lack of a mechanism to evaluate the socio-economic benefits of sustainability in relation to housing regeneration projects at the early stage of the project’s development. The results suggest that the environmental factors of sustainability continue to be the most dominant factor of sustainability considered by built environment practitioners as compared to the consideration of a project’s potential socio-economic benefits.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | socio-economic benefit; sustainable housing; regeneration projects |
| Index terms: | socio-economic benefit, environmental impact, practitioner, built environment, environmental factor, built environment research, implementation, construction industry, housing, sustainable housing, interview, manager, regeneration project, exploratory study |
| Subjects: | housing and residential development, research management, industry analysis, infrastructure and transport systems, financial analysis, economic development, research methods, environmental science, contractual arrangements, data collection methods, construction type, environmental impact, practitioner |
| Topics: | Sustainability, Construction Technology, Procurement, Roles and Professions, Research Practice, Cost Management, Urban Studies |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTE |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here