Abstract/Summary

Expert-led Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment Tools (NSATs) dominate local-scale sustainability assessments. However, criticisms highlight their exclusion of public participation and lack of social, cultural, and contextual sensitivity. My research proposes a novel approach to address these limitations by exploring the value of community participation in complementing and finetuning expert-led NSATs. It aims to examine how professionals can use community-led evaluation to adapt generic NSAT frameworks to the specific cultural contexts of new affordable housing neighbourhoods, focusing on the Middle Eastern context. Building on the growing body of research around hybrid sustainability indicators, this study investigates the question: How can built environment professionals use community-led evaluation to adapt generic Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) frameworks to the needs of specific cultural contexts? To answer this question, I developed three objectives: 1) To identify the dimensions of neighbourhood sustainability assessment that are relevant to hybrid assessment approaches. 2) To develop a participatory post-occupancy evaluation (POE) framework specific to the context of affordable housing neighbourhoods. And 3) To examine the value of POE in adapting international NSATs to local contexts. My research employed a case study of the Alsayah affordable housing neighbourhood in Muharraq, Bahrain. Adopting an inductive, grounded theory approach, I conducted qualitative open-ended interviews with residents to understand their interactions with their environment. I analysed the data using thematic coding and content analysis, facilitated by NVivo software. I discussed the findings in relation to the LEED-ND framework, which is a dominant expert-led NSAT. The findings show that sociological variables, particularly age and gender, significantly influence residents' evaluation of their neighbourhood's sustainability. Responses also show a strong interplay between the social and physical features of neighbourhoods, especially density and residential satisfaction. Overall, the findings suggest that community-led NSATs should not be seen as a replacement to expert-led tools, but rather as a complementary tool that could provide a more comprehensive and culturally sensitive assessment.