Type of building: Residential terraced home
Purpose: Living
Year of construction: 2020
Location: Njiverdal, Netherlands
Built-up area: 128m2
Project lead: BouwNovum
Integrating all dimensions
This newly built social housing apartment block is part of the ActiveHouse Alliance project in the Netherlands. This alliance aims to create sustainable, affordable and comfortable housing, featuring many of the indicators of the healthy buildings framework.
What stands out in this project is the creation of a novel integrative construction process using off-site construction and circular materials. This led to significant cost reductions because of its efficiency. The use of bio-based materials also decreased the carbon footprint of this building.
Together with creating affordable social housing, this case study demonstrates how the five dimensions of health can be successfully integrated.
Dimensions
In order to comprehensively assess the health of the building in this case study, various dimensions were evaluated, each measured through specific indicators relevant to their respective domains. The following figure presents the ratings for each dimension, providing a visual summary of the building's overall health status.
Data insights for the Netherlands
This case uses two data sets linked to the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) indicator from the Improving mental and physical health dimension, and the Blue and green infrastructure indicator from the Resilient and adaptive dimension.
Healthy building projects need to ensure they can deal with wet weather conditions to prevent damp issues. Moreover, the Netherlands has an urban population of 30-40%, which requires innovative ways to utilise building space effectively to leave enough room for nature.
Preventing damp
Damp issues are particularly important in social housing projects, where people might not have enough disposable income to keep their homes warm enough to prevent damp. The Netherlands is higher than the EU average when it comes to people experiencing issues associated with damp. For people on low incomes, more than 22% had damp issues in 2020.
A key factor in the project was to ensure that the least amount of space was used. For example, no parking spaces for cars are provided to save space.
