At the Greenbuild conference in Los Angeles this week, there’s been a lot of talk about the increasing availability of sophisticated data and analytical tools for assessing climate risk, decarbonization, energy efficiency and more. But there’s another kind of information that’s vital to establishing sustainable projects: human data and social context.
During the “Healthy Spaces for All Summit” and a panel titled “Co-Designing Community Health and Wellbeing,” panelists discussed finding the “human path” in their projects by engaging communities and soliciting feedback. As such, that human path will vary project by project.
“We have best practices for what we should do,” said Seema Bhangra, principal of healthy buildings and communities, U.S. Green Building Council, the question is what to prioritize.
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For the first time, Bhangra noted, LEED v5 has made a Human Impact Statement mandatory for each project applying for certification. The statement covers not only occupants of buildings, but also construction workers, the community and surrounding communities.
After gathering community data, it’s important to mine it for trends, said Alicia Silva, director & founder of Revitaliza Consultores, a green building and sustainability advisory. As consultants for the $180 million renovation of Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Silva’s team engaged with 148 stakeholders through 500 interviews.
One of the trends they found in the feedback was that the community surrounding the stadium was very concerned about trash management on game days—something that ticketholders may not even think about.
The stadium, which has been certified LEED Platinum, will be completed in 2026 in time for the FIFA World Cup games.
Residents know the priorities
When engaging with the community to get feedback as well as their support, bring food and find out who the unofficial “mayor” of the community is, recommended Rochelle Mills, president & CEO of Innovative Housing Opportunities, a California-based nonprofit developer.
Residents, Mills said, know what they need, and “they feel respected when you address what they already know.” After turning the community feedback data into priorities, Mills said, it’s important to go back to and ask “how did we do?”
For Innovative Housing Opportunities, community engagement doesn’t stop when they project is completed. There is a “new layer of community engagement” once residents move in. To bring together residents of a community at which three languages are spoken, for example, the company offered a yoga class where speaking wasn’t required.
“They were just much healthier, and that came from one yoga class where they didn’t need language,” she said.
At the company’s deeply affordable communities, engagement includes helping residents “move up, move forward and move out,” Mills said. “What if we spend as much time equipping people to move out—that is what we do.”
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