The building sector, due to the significant energy and environmental footprints it creates, needs to adopt sustainable approaches to help prevent global warming and climate change. Sustainable Building (SB) rating systems have been developed around the world as a method to promote sustainability in this sector. Water is one of the most vital natural resources, and is extensively consumed in the building sector. This article examines the coverage of water-related aspects in 11 prominent SB rating systems under the three key sustainability dimensions: environmental, economic, and social, using a comprehensive coverage analysis approach. Findings highlight a wide range of variation between the examined SB rating systems in terms of water attributes being assessed, water assessment criteria used, the optimal number of these criteria, and the weight assigned to them. Results also show that in general, most of the examined systems exhibit low representativeness and comprehensive coverage of major water subcategories and themes related to sustainable buildings. However, some moderate to high comprehensive coverage was found in water attributes that focus on the environmental and social aspects. The results indicate that representative and comprehensive coverage of social-related water attributes are less than that of environment-related water attributes. The results also highlighted the effectiveness of using coverage analysis techniques as a systematic and efficient way to assess comprehensive coverage of water criteria in SB rating systems.

Urban quality of life (QOL) is a complex and multidimensional concept. A wide range of urban QOL assessment tools has been developed worldwide to measure and monitor the quality of urban life taking into account the particular conditions of cities/regions and the needs of their residents. This study aims to develop an urban QOL assessment tool appropriate for the context of Saudi Arabia (SA). For this purpose, this study developed and used a structured approach that consists of an in-depth analysis of 21 urban QOL assessment tools in use worldwide, combined with focus group analysis and feedback from a panel of experts. The results revealed that there is a lack of consensus among the existing tools regarding the usage of QOL indicators and domains, and that the majority of the tools demonstrate a lack of proper coverage of QOL subdomains. The results also show wide variations in the number of indicators used and that most of the examined tools are using objective measurable indicators. This study has identified 67 indicators distributed across 13 domains that constitute the core criteria of the proposed QOL assessment tool. The selected indicators and domains cover all the attributes of urban QOL and are evaluated by experts as important criteria to assess/measure QOL. Moreover, the results demonstrate the advantage of the developed framework and comprehensive list of criteria (CLC) as a structured and efficient approach to design better QOL assessment tools.

Although indicators are commonly used to measure/assess urban quality of life (QOL), there is no consensus in the literature on the core indicators of urban QOL. This paper aims to identify a set of key indicators that will be used to assess/measure urban QOL in the Saudi Arabia (SA) context. For this purpose, a three-round online Delphi procedure is used. A group of 92 local experts were asked to rate the importance of a set of pre-defined indicators in assessing/measuring urban QOL. The results reveal that the panel of experts reached consensus and agreed on the high importance of 53 indicators for assessing/measuring urban QOL. These indicators provide appropriate coverage of the three core dimensions of urban QOL: environmental, social and economic. However, the results also show that the social indicators are perceived as more essential than economic and environmental indicators. This finding has practical implications for designing and developing QOL assessment tools to better capture and measure urban QOL in the SA context. Furthermore, research findings also identified some methodological limitations associated with using the Delphi approach, which need to be addressed to ensure the development of comprehensive QOL assessment tools.

This article examines the impact of digital media on architectural design education based on teaching experience in the e-studio. The primary goal of the estudio is to teach students how to think and design using digital media as the only design medium. The article reports on e-studio practices, discusses the pedagogical implications of the studio and contributes to understanding the relationship between digital media, design practices and education. It reveals that digital media as used in the e-studio can bring important changes to the architectural design process, the design studio praxis, the design outcome and the way in which students envision and describe architecture. The article highlights the ambivalent nature of digital media as design tools and shows the need to reconsider our traditional understanding of the design studio culture.

This research examines the usage of indicators and the attributes of sustainability they measure in 11 renowned sustainable building (SB) assessment systems from various regions of the world. The work develops and uses a “Comprehensive List of Sustainable Building Indicators (CLoSBI)” as a base-case to examine the indicators’ usage in different SB assessment systems and to what extent these systems are consistent in their coverage of sustainability attributes. The results reveal a deep variation between examined practices, and a lack of consensus not only on the type and the optimal number of indicators used in a system, but also on the depth and breadth of coverage of various SB attributes. The results shows that, in general, most of the examined systems reflect a low to adequate comprehensive coverage, the highest of which is found in the environmental followed by social categories. On the other hand, the most of the examined systems reveal a very low representative coverage, which suggests that a large portion of important SB attributes across the three core dimensions of sustainability are not covered by any indicator. The economic dimension of building's sustainability reflects severe lack of comprehensive and representative coverage in all examined systems. The results also suggest that deep coverage of some SB attributes comes, in many cases, at the cost of underrepresenting some other important sustainability attributes. Furthermore, the research results demonstrate the usefulness of using the coverage analysis framework as a structured and efficient approach to evaluate the appropriateness of a set of indicators to assess the various aspects of SB attributes.

The paper develops and uses a structured coverage analysis approach to examine the usage of indicators and their ability to assess various quality of life (QOL) attributes in 15 urban QOL assessment tools. The results reveal a lack of consensus not only on the type and the optimal number of indicators for a tool, but also on the methods used to select and develop them. The results show that most of the tools tend to use almost incompatible sets of indicators. They also show that, in general, most of the examined tools reflect severe lack of representative coverage, which indicates that large portion of important sub-domains is not covered by any indicator, except for the economic-related domains. In addition, most of the tools reflect low-to-moderate comprehensive coverage, except for the economic dimension, which reflects the highest comprehensive coverage. The findings also suggest some conditions that can improve the process of selecting and developing a contextualised set of indicators. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the usefulness of using the proposed coverage analysis techniques as a structured approach to benchmark with best QOL assessment tools to improve the process of developing sets of QOL indicators for a particular urban context.