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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 28th Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2012, Edinburgh, UK. Association of Researchers in Construction Management, 1279–88.

  • Type: Conference Proceedings
  • Keywords: socio-economic benefit; sustainable housing; regeneration projects
  • ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-9552390-6-9
  • URL: http://www.arcom.ac.uk/-docs/proceedings/ar2012-1279-1288_Akotia_Fortune.pdf
  • 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.