Factors that influence Australian community buildings’ sustainable management
Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management
ISSN: 0969-9988
Article publication date: 16 January 2017
Abstract
Purpose
Australia has a huge stock of community buildings built up over decades. Their replacements consume a large sum of money from country’s economy which has called for a strategy for their sustainable management. For this, a comprehensive decision-making structure is an utmost requirement. The purpose of this paper is to capture their sustainable management from four aspects, i.e. environmental, economic, social and functional.
Design/methodology/approach
The design process follows an extensive review of environmental and life cycle assessments and company context documents. Extracted factors are tailored to community buildings management following expert consultation. However, the resulted list of factors is extremely large, and “factor analysis” technique is used to group the factors. For this, an industry-wide questionnaire across Australian local councils is employed to solicit opinions of the list of factors.
Findings
The analysis has pinpointed 18 key parameters (criteria) to represent all four aspects. This paper presents the preliminary findings of the factors and the analysis results based on the questionnaire responses.
Practical implications
The final decision-making structure incorporates all these aspects and criteria. This can be used to develop a decision-making model which produces a sustainability index for building components. Asset managers can mainly use the sustainability index to prioritise their maintenance activities and eventually, to find out cost-optimisation options for them.
Originality/value
Most notably, this is the first study to apply all four sustainability aspects (environmental, economic, social and functional) to develop a decision-making structure for Australian community buildings’ sustainable management.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper is a part of the research project funded by the Australian Research Council under the industry linkage grant scheme (Project ID: LP0990794). The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council in funding this research project. They would like to give special thanks to the partner organisation “Municipal Association of Victoria” who helped facilitating workshops and collaborating other research partners. They would also like to thank six associated local councils in Victoria for their great contribution towards the research’s success by providing their opinions and feedback, particularly on the questionnaire development.
Citation
Kalutara, P., Zhang, G., Setunge, S. and Wakefield, R. (2017), "Factors that influence Australian community buildings’ sustainable management", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 94-117. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-10-2015-0158
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited