1. Introduction
Owing to the recent growing array of environmental challenges, researchers and practitioners began to suggest and debate the sustainable character of vernacular architecture in relation to contemporary buildings which in many cases, are associated with a range of environment depleting characterization such as carbon footprints, uncontrollable energy consumption, wasteful use of resources and pollution [
1]. The ecological friendliness of vernacular architecture, its passive technologies and its rootedness with vernacular tradition continue to be positioned as a repository of knowledge and values which the contemporary construction industry can draw on for any attempt to develop more sustainable built environments. As such, vernacular architecture has gained a renewed interest and its imagery is no longer relegated to the nostalgic aide-mémoire of long-forgotten past or mere roadblocks to contemporary progress.
However, despite the renewed interest, all the representations of vernacular architecture lessons have operated under preconceived themes that privileges environmental sustainability over other pillars of sustainable development. Even while most of the researches has been accomplished through diverse disciplinary backgrounds, the devotion to the idea of assessing the extent to which vernacular materials perform in the context of environmental sustainability continues to unite most of the studies. Most of the studies investigate vernacular architecture in relation to its thermal properties in the way the material, layouts and building types relate to the microclimate and geographical conditions [
2,
3,
4,
5].
Given this reductionist representation of vernacular architecture in the broad literature, this paper argues that it has limited the broad concept of sustainability and narrowed the plural lessons of vernacular architecture is a partial one. Even while a large continuing body of scholar has demonstrated the importance of the social pillar of sustainability in sustainable development [
6,
7,
8,
9] and with vernacular architecture being conceptualized as the objectification of social relations [
10], studies that treat this pillar in relation to lessons of sustainability in vernacular architecture remain less advanced. Given this identified research lacuna, this study aims to conduct the assessment of social sustainability indicators in vernacular architecture. To pursue this nature of research aim, green building assessment approach, among others, provides a platform for assessment of such sustainability indicators. Against this background, this paper adopts a proposed Social Criteria of Green Building Assessment Tool (SCGBAT) for the assessment of social sustainability in vernacular architecture. To empirically delineate the research aim, the study draws on a case study approach to operationalize the proposed SCGBAT.
To organize this paper and structure the argumentations, it is organized into two main parts. Part 1 is the theoretical review aspect which led to the adoption of the SCGBAT while part 2 is the application of the tools through a case study approach. Part one is organized into the following sections; following this introduction part is
Section 2, which dwells on a rapid review of vernacular architecture and sustainability discourse. The following subsection focuses on the review of green building assessment tools in relation to social sustainability assessment. Also, the section explains the SCGBAT and the reason for the choice of selecting the tool for this research. Part 2 of this paper begins from
Section 3, which is the methodology applied to organize and structure the operationalization of the SCGBAT. The section also gives the background to the case study and the building characterizations.
Section 4 shows the results,
Section 5 discusses the results and the implication of the data while
Section 6 is the conclusion part of the paper. Based on this structuring of this paper, this study contributes the identified research gap by drawing on a green building assessment approach to demonstrate how to assess the social sustainability indicators in vernacular architecture.
2. Vernacular Architecture and the Sustainability Discourse
As an introduction caveat, this section does not attempt to provide a holistic review of the discourse of vernacular architecture and sustainability, as such would require a book-length treatment [
11]. This section only aims to provide the important summations of the discourses as regards the pillars of sustainability with reference to vernacular architecture. By vernacular architecture, this paper refers to buildings that are regionally representative, regionally distinctive and regionally understood [
12]. By extension, this definition includes the architecture of a precinct and/or a people or of an ethnic group, who lives in a particular geographical location [
13]. Over the last 2 decades or so, this typology of architecture has emerged as a term that has taken up a life, not only within cultural heritage studies but also within the discourse of sustainability and sustainable development as well. For this reason, a large continuing body of works has demonstrated its values and why vernacular architecture should be taken seriously in architectural practice, for example, References [
1,
14,
15]. The most frequent expression which summarizes the aims of the research includes, ‘lessons from vernacular architecture’ and ‘learning from the vernacular’ for example, References [
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29]. As such, it has simply become related to specific arguments such as positioning it as a didactic alternative to the contemporary architecture which is associated with uncontrollable greenhouse gas emission, disproportionate energy consumption and unsustainable use of earth’s resources [
1,
27,
28]. Thus, the recent discourses on vernacular architecture in relations to sustainability have been accomplished arguably under the following groups of studies.
First, there is a group of study that demonstrates the environmental sustainability lessons that can be drawn from vernacular architecture. In this context, it is explained that vernacular architecture holds enormous lessons as demonstrated by a growing body of researches which has illustrated it through various case studies [
25,
27,
28,
30,
31,
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37]. Some studies also demonstrated through various computer-based modeling how vernacular architecture have a lower carbon footprint and consumes lesser energy in comparison to modern buildings in the regions, for example, References [
27,
28]. In the same vein, some of the studies also demonstrate how vernacular buildings are more thermally comfortable than the contemporary building by employing climatically responsive technologies, building techniques, materials and technologies without recourse to active mechanical means. For example, Praytino and Winaktoe [
2] used an ecological model based approach on vernacular housing to demonstrate this relevance. Shaffer [
5] also attempted to reinvent similar vernacular elements by synthesizing it using modern techniques. Dayaratne [
3,
4] equally demonstrated how traditional earth construction material and techniques were reinvented in Sri Lanka for sustainability and as common alternative to modern concrete technologies. Some of the studies also examined the techniques and technologies employed in vernacular settlements which make them responsive to the environment and therefore contribute to sustainability [
38]. Lastly, there are also researches which demonstrate how vernacular architecture respond to geographical conditions geological and environmental resources and have fashioned the buildings that are sensitive to the prevailing environmental conditions [
39,
40,
41].
The second group of studies emphasizes the economic sustainability lesson of vernacular architecture by suggesting that it responds and satisfies the needs of a community in the context of being more self-sufficient through sustaining the production and optimizing of local material by choosing to build through a collective communal effort [
11]. In this regard, this group of studies suggested that vernacular architecture is more efficient management in the local resources which in turn becomes the main goal of any community [
11,
42,
43]. Also, vernacular architecture has judicious use of resources which are scarce such as water or wood in arid environments [
30,
31,
43]. This holds substantial lessons for the contemporary building industry on how to manage available resources for the sake of the future generation.
The third group of studies adumbrate the cultural sustainability lessons that can be drawn from vernacular architecture by suggesting that it encourages the re-establishment of the anthropological and social particularity of a specific locality [
44,
45]. It is often described as a non-arrogant, connected, peaceful, minimalist architecture that is in organic association with its site, topographies. It embodies intangible knowledge as well as tangible know-how and it is a testimony to the genial capacity of adaptation of the human to environmental constraints and opportunities. With this in view, vernacular architecture is argued to demonstrates cultural sustainability lesson through its approach which demonstrates the capacity to transform locally available materials (such as earth, stone, plants, wood) into construction elements and buildings (such as stables, houses, mosques and churches) that are organic with its place and addresses the social and the cultural identity of the particular locality [
11]. Against this background, vernacular architecture is an incubator of regional identities, traditional craft and technique, human creativity and collective memory [
46]. Summarily, according to these studies, the loss of vernacular architecture is tantamount to loss of traditional knowledge, regional and local identities. It also equals the loss of collective memory, loss of languages, traditional crafts and techniques and a continuum of lessons in the context of sustainable development as demonstrated by the overview in this section.
As demonstrated by the rapid review, despite of the plethora of research position and the growing interest in the discourse of vernacular architecture, the social dimension which is equally an important component of vernacular settlement and their innate traditions, remains less advanced than researches in the direction of environmental sustainability. Thus, as a contribution to the existing scant positions in the context of social sustainability, this study adopts a building assessment system as an approach to assess the social dimension of vernacular buildings. However, before this is done, it is important to give a background to the building assessment tools and the understanding of social sustainability in the building assessment processes. In this regard, the following section gives an overview of the rating system and their approach to the assessment of social sustainability.
Building Assessment Tools, Social Sustainability and Proposed Social Criteria for Green Building Assessment (SCGBAT)
Over the years, Green Building Assessment Tools (GBATs) have grown to become the banner conveying the sustainability standards in different locations around the world. It has become widely adopted to reduce carbon emission, reduce energy consumption and providing the basis for healthy and comfortable building spaces while generating benefits for environmental, economic and social aspects [
47]. Building assessment tools have been developed with a specific end goal to aid the application of sustainable development in the building and construction sector. It is a tool developed for the specific goal of ensuring sustainable development in the construction sector [
48]. It is applied with the sole intent of evaluating, promoting and enhancing the comprehensive understanding of sustainability in the building industry through data evaluations, investigation and differentiation [
49,
50]. As such, different countries have developed different contextual building assessment tools such as the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency (CASBEE) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen (DGNB)—to mention a few—to ensure sustainable development in the different countries [
48]. Two basic tools characterize the operationalization of the assessment of GBATs: the life cycle assessment tool and the criteria based tools. Enormous researches have been conducted in the direction of the criteria based assessment tools such as LEED, BREEAM, CASBEE and Green Star among others [
51].
However, despite the robustness in the importance of GBATs, the social aspect remain less elaborate in comparison to the other pillars of sustainability. Despite the growing body of scholarly works have suggested that sustainable development requires the three pillars: environmental criteria, economic criteria and social criteria to acts as a continuum for sustainable development to be achieved [
52,
53,
54,
55,
56,
57,
58,
59]. Yet, appraisal of the criteria tools for the GBAT indicates that significant attention continues to be drawn to the environmental criteria of most building assessment tool while the social criteria remain in flux. This material essentialism of the most popular building tools reduces their effectiveness in the context of representing the social dynamics of a particular setting. More so, some of these tools are customer-needs oriented to such an extent that designers embark on pursuing credits [
60].
In the literature, the importance of social sustainability has generated a plethora of positions over the years. For example, a study [
61] explained social sustainability with regards to dual two factors, namely, equity and democracy. A study [
6] also suggested that it as a movement that comes to play while regulating the progress of civil society, while the improvement brings about a rich environment. Meanwhile, Reference [
7] explained it as a longtime association between society and nature. Furthermore, Reference [
8] explained social sustainability to be contributory, enlightening and sustaining human welfare. Another study [
9] argued that social sustainability is accomplishable if a project incorporates environmental understanding while lessening the social differences and hierarchies and in the same vein, enhancing personal satisfaction. These understandings of social sustainability have enormous utility with regards to the understanding of the conceptual dimension of vernacular architecture as an objectification of social relations [
10]. As such, any assessment of sustainability in such buildings or of new development in such a context must incorporate the profound necessity for social sustainability. Thus, socially sustainable approaches in building assessment tools will be necessary to elucidate the relationship between the building and its users in an incorporated way, in this manner, factoring in both environmental and social aspects of sustainability. Nevertheless, the GBATs lacks an approach which sufficiently involves a comprehensive assessment of stakeholders [
60,
62].
Therefore, against the background of the identified gap of social sustainability in GBATs, a recent study by Atanda [
63] developed sets of social categories/indicators by drawing on social sustainability literature and the criteria available in the existing green building assessment tools to develop categories and indicators. Eight set categories (health and safety; participation and control; education; equity, accessibility and satisfaction; social cohesion; cultural values and physical resilience) were suggested and tailored based on the adoption of LEED working sheet thereby creating a working sheet termed Social Criteria for Green Building Assessment (SCGBAT). The suggested 8 social categories are accompanied by 35 indicators that were selected by the application of a two-round questionnaire responded to by qualified experts for the support of evaluation for social criteria in GBAT. The categories and indicator as illustrated in
Table 1 below.
To operationalize the suggested categories and indicators, the author applied Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to find the most relevant measurement and weight for the resulting indicators and categories [see 61]. In this paper, social criteria are defined as an aspect that affects the final users within the living space of the building (indoors and outdoors) such as its health, safety, visuals, accessibility, cultural values and participation in attaining sustainability. According to this understanding of social criteria and based on the adopted definition, the approach, indicators and categories suggested and integrated by Reference [
63] is considered to be appropriate to achieve the research aim of this study. In a vernacular settlement, people are often collectively involved in the creation, decision making and planning of vernacular spaces and as such affected by it. In this regard, any assessment in such contextual settlement must be people-driven. Thus, there is an imperative need for integrating social sustainability criteria into the building assessment tool for effective assessment in the case of vernacular settlement which is built contingent on the abundance of socio-cultural traditions in a particular setting.
5. Discussion
The results demonstrated that the investigated vernacular architecture lacked in; Physical Resilience Indicator (PRI), Environmental Education Indicator (EEI), Accessibility and Satisfaction Indicator (ASI) but satisfactorily better in the context of Health and Safety Indicator (HSI); Participation and Control Indicator (PCI); Social Equity Indicator (SEI); Social Cohesion Indicator (SCI); and Cultural Value Indicator (CVI).
The indicator of participation and control namely PCI 2—willingness to act and improve environment (4/8) and PCI 4—conference and seminar (0/0.9) demonstrated low responses from all the respondents. The low responses as regard the willingness to act is indicative of the fact that the young population of the village does not want to live in the vernacular architecture anymore and they prefer the contemporary alternatives they observe in the city. The Low response concerning the conference and seminar is simply self-evident since no such awareness raising conferences are organized in the village at any point. Also, two of the indicators of environmental education: EEI 4—Water and waste management (1/2.5) and EEI 2—Energy sources (1/3.2) ranked lowly from the responses. This is also indicative of the fact that in vernacular settlement, they rely on traditional indigenous knowledge of energy and energy sources, as such; formal knowledge of energy sources is not available [
83]. In the same manner as the other two mentioned categories, the indicator of social equity: SEI 3–formation of governance structure (2/4.3) also ranked lowly in the responses. This is because; governance structure in Louroujina village is vested in a specific family. Furthermore, indicator: ASI 1- Access to social information about green building also ranked low because of the previously described factors about the preference for indigenous knowledge as against formal knowledge [
84]. The indicator of physical resilience categories namely—PRI 2—compliance to earthquake resistance code (0/1.2), PRI 3—mitigation in the use of environmental resources (0/0.7) and PRI 4–sustainable management of hazards (0.2/0.9) demonstrated a low response from the experts. This is indicative of the fact that vernacular architecture was built based on a non-formal understanding of the concept of resilience and engineering compliance (Ibid.)
6. Conclusions
This paper assesses the social sustainability indicators in vernacular architecture through the application of a proposed set of 8 social sustainability categories and 37 indicators. The main proposed categories are health and safety; participation and control; education; equity, accessibility and satisfaction; social cohesion; cultural values; physical resilience [
51,
63]. The weighted score of each indicator was used to assess the social sustainability criteria of vernacular architecture in Louroujina village, Cyprus. One hundred and thirty five questionnaires were administered based on the 8 categories and the 37 indicators of social sustainability. One hundred and twenty one of the respondents were residents and occupants of the four residential typologies of vernacular architecture in Louroujina village while the other 14 respondents are professionals and experts working closely on projects in the village. These expert groups include the academia, the staff of the department of antiquity, staff of the municipality office and heritage site managers among others (see
Table 5). The respondents were asked to assess the indicators in five-point Likert scale. As demonstrated by the analysis of results, the vernacular architecture in Louroujina village demonstrated a nearly satisfactory level of social sustainability from the respondents.
In this regard, this paper contributes to the advancement of knowledge concerning the assessment of social indicators in vernacular architecture which has witnessed less advancement in recent years. Also, this study has demonstrated the empirical application of the proposed conceptual SCGBAT assessment tool, especially, its compatibility, strengths and weaknesses in the context of assessing social values in vernacular landscapes. While several methods have been applied to assess the sustainability lessons of vernacular architecture over the years, green building assessment approach remains in a dearth. Against this background, by applying a green building assessment approach, this paper demonstrates that there are considerable lessons that can be drawn from vernacular architecture in the context of social sustainability. In this regard, the outcomes of this research can be used as an empirical basis for assessing the social sustainability of vernacular architecture which has long been ignored. However, in the course of the study, it was realized there are several other indicators of social sustainability of vernacular architecture that were not considered in the SGCBAT proposed categories and indicators. While the indicators proposed by the SCGBAT are important, some of the indicators are however not in tandem with the traditional philosophy of vernacular architecture in some cases. Thus, for future research, it is suggested that the categories and indicators be developed contextually using a vernacular settlement as a case study. The indicators and categories can be improved by using more in-depth vernacular architecture case study, creating different categories and adding more regionally specific indicators.