Adding Affordability to Sustainability

Sustainability is the major concern in today’s world. In built environment, it has tremendous significance. Housing, as its major bulk, needs serious attention on all the three major pillars of sustainability. Turning to the environmental aspects, there are different active and passive design elements that can be incorporated with housing. However, it varies from context to context. This book tried to identify environmentally sustainable elements of housing in the hot-humid climate in Malaysia through extensive literature review. After that, it conducted field survey to find out the affordable ones among them which could address the big group of middle income people in the country. With that, the study tried to find out the economic feasibility of those environmentally sustainable elements. Categorizing them as user-controlled and designer-controlled elements, results showed that several user-controlled passive and active elements were not affordable, though they had been highly regarded as sustainable elements. At the end, the study highlighted the significance of adding affordability to sustainability so that it can eventually contribute to the biggest bulk in built environment.