Spatial Quality in Building Performance Assessment Tools, The case of Dwelling Renovation for Energy Efficiency

Abstract

The contribution of this paper is to analyse the availability of spatial quality assessment in two major building performance assessment tools that are used in Europe considering dwelling renovation: the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method UK 2008 (BREEAM UK 2008) and the Sustainable Buildings Tool (SBTool 2012). Spatial quality contributes to people’s well-being and quality of life and therefore its inclusion in renovation processes gives arguments that may increase stakeholders’ receptiveness to and investments in energy-efficiency renovation. This paper reveals part of the gap and the conflict between technical and non-technical dimensions in the tools, and suggests opportunities for improvement in terms of validity, reliability, sensitivity and specificity of the spatial quality assessment. Due to their relevance to (1) and wideranging cover of the building process, tools open up an opportunity to implement spatial quality assessment in dwelling renovation. Including more and better spatial quality indicators in the tools can contribute to raising awareness of the importance of this issue among design professionals and decision makers, and provide additional incentives for energy efficiency