Indicator for Sustainable Housing Design: from EcoHomes to the Code for Sustainable Homes

It is widely acknowledged that sustainability principles should be addressed in the housing
market to tackle climate change. In the UK, many regulation- or policy-related housing
assessment tools have been enacted to ensure the compulsory objective of carbon-neural
new homes can be progressively achieved by 2016. Until now, however, there is no one of
them can truly accommodate all the competing parameters in the design processes or apply
to all circumstances of building construction alone. To select the most suitable ones and
optimise the application according to their relevance, this paper aims to identify the specific
characteristics of different assessment tools, particularly focusing on their innovative aspects
relevant to designers today. Three prevailing sustainable housing assessment tools,
Building Research Establishment’s (BRE) EcoHomes, the Code for Sustainable Homes and
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), have been closely compared.
Based on the extensive studies, a general consensus is reached on the palette of
environmental issues that should be addressed in the housing design processes. This set of
sustainable housing design issues can be used as a prototype of the sustainability indicator
to support the decision making processes, and as a communicational platform to get the
message across between different stakeholder groups.