Abstract
This chapter attempts to answer a seemingly simple question: do residents of new housing developments, built according to sustainability principles, behave any more sustainably than the population in general? The research takes thirteen ‘sustainable’ housing (or predominantly housing with some other uses) schemes in the UK and investigates how sustainably their residents behave. We are only interested in sustainable behaviours that are argued, in planning and urban design theory or policy, to be supported or enabled by the physical design of the schemes. We address this task by comparing our findings with those taken from national surveys and the ‘core’ case study neighbourhoods’ survey. We also give evidence from our study (for ease, termed the ’sustainable behaviours’ [SB] study) on residents’ self-reported links between their behaviours and the design of their developments.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the participants in our surveys and our team of field researchers. We would also like to thank the developers and planners who provided technical information on the schemes. The project was guided by an active steering group, and its input is also much appreciated.
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Williams, K., Dair, C., Lindsay, M. (2010). Neighbourhood Design and Sustainable Lifestyles. In: Jenks, M., Jones, C. (eds) Dimensions of the Sustainable City. Future City, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8647-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8647-2_9
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