High-rise urban development has been controversial for its inability to foster cohesive and flourishing neighbourhoods. A social value perspective can help to better understand and evaluate how new developments in dense urban settings affect places and communities. While the link between wellbeing and social value is well-established in the literature, the question of how design can affect wellbeing and thus contribute to the social value of a development still requires further research and clarification. A better understanding of this relationship can assist architects, developers or consultants during the design process. A review is presented of relevant quantifiable aspects of building design that affect wellbeing in relation to the indoor environment and to social value specifically. A framework for fostering wellbeing is developed to test these aspects and evaluate the indoor environment performance. A case study building is used to analyse the relationship between building design and wellbeing. These lessons can be used to inform and evaluate building design during the design phases to complement the assessment of qualitative factors within a social value framework. Practice relevance This study identifies quantifiable aspects of the indoor environment affecting wellbeing in a high-rise development that can form part of a social value framework. This list of identified aspects provides a useful starting point for architects or consultants to assess designs. The indicators relate to quantifiable indoor environment aspects that can be directly controlled by building design and complement the broader concepts of wellbeing within a social value framework. The paper demonstrates how these aspects can be quantified in a case study mixed-use urban development as part of a post-occupancy evaluation. These quantifiable aspects could be integrated within digital tools to evaluate the building at the design stage to ensure that wellbeing is at the forefront of the project considerations.

Building performance simulation tools such as the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) can be invaluable for improving energy-efficiency in housing design. However, achieving improved energy performance is also a sociotechnical issue, and how this is dealt with during the architectural design process seems less well studied. This collaborative design research project for a low-energy prefab house with an industry partner, a manufacturer of Structural Insulated Panels (SIP), is used as a case study to show that it is possible to achieve high energy performance while addressing specific socio-technical concerns within an Australian volume homebuilding market. A key issue that emerged in this project was the perceived tension between passive design expectations in Australia and those promoted through the Passive House software tool.

Purpose: This paper presents a pilot study of a machine learning (ML) approach to predict occupants' satisfaction with the indoor environment in high-rise mixed-use buildings, aiming to validate a proof of concept for integrating ML models into early-stage design tools to support occupant-centred performance evaluation. Design/methodology/approach: Using post-occupancy evaluation data from a case study building, Random Forest and Neural Network models were trained to classify satisfaction levels–Dissatisfied, Neutral or Satisfied–for both residents and workers based on indoor environmental factors. The methodology focuses on addressing class imbalance through data resampling and cost-sensitive learning, with model performance assessed using class-specific metrics. Findings: Both models achieved high overall accuracy (cross-validation score >0.80), with notable improved performance in identifying minority classes after balancing methods were employed. While limited to a single case study, future data collection across diverse buildings and occupant profiles has the potential to improve performance and enable generalisability. Originality/value: This research demonstrates the feasibility of a scalable framework for predicting indoor environmental satisfaction, enabling the integration of ML models into simulation-based workflows for data-driven, occupant-centric design evaluation. It advances the field by (1) classifying satisfaction into three actionable categories while explicitly addressing class imbalance, (2) operationalising POE data to move beyond retrospective reporting and (3) establishing a proof of concept for embedding ML models into early-stage design tools.

This article is about the history of Norfolk & Prior, a firm of architects & surveyors based in Lewisham 1893–1923, and their role in that area’s house building boom of the time. The case study helps to shed more light on a crossover occupation that played a key role in the planning and design of London's speculative housing in this period. The first section touches on the business history and biography of the two main partners, Stanley Prior and Edward Stone. Stone was responsible for the architectural work of the firm, so his education is then discussed in more detail. Subsequent sections examine Norfolk & Prior’s work for several local house builders. The paper concludes by summarizing the role of Norfolk & Prior as designers of speculative housing and placing it in the wider context of a process of professionalization in architecture.

Extreme heat events have become more common and more severe during summer than ever before as a result of the warming climate in Australia. The impact of urban morphology and green coverage on outdoor thermal comfort has been the subject of extensive research, however, their link to suburban developments of different historic periods is still underexplored. This paper investigates and compares the outdoor thermal performance of ten suburban areas constructed since the late nineteenth century in Greater Adelaide, which were built to different planning ideals and concepts of their time. Microclimate models of two precedents for five development eras were constructed in ENVI-met, validated with site data related to a recent heatwave event in 2023, and then used to facilitate further investigation of the impact of development patterns on outdoor thermal comfort. This study examines how these urban patterns perform in scenarios of varying development intensity and greenery ratio. In these case studies, the distance between buildings, streets’ spatial ratio and green coverage has a significant impact on the thermal environment. The results underline the impact of solar exposure on outdoor thermal performance even in lower-density suburban areas. Some of the outcomes of the study are counter-intuitive to conventional assumptions about urban design typologies. In this comparison, for example, one of the “green” model garden city developments did not perform as well as denser 19th-century suburbs. The results can support better decision-making for future urban planning in Australia and other regions with similar climate conditions. The study shows that real performance does not always align with stated green ambitions and, urban design should consider and evaluate heat mitigation through evidence-based testing to achieve real green development.