اميرعلي علايي

Sustainable development is becoming an issue of critical importance for almost three decades, in all aspects, especially in architectural and urban designing decisions. At first, sustainable development has had the most influence on the environment, then along with the economy, and finally social dimension. Sustainable development has many pillars which are focusing on different fields, since there is a Lack of attention to social issues in sustainable development and it can cause instability in different areas, so this paper is going to have more focus on it. The purpose of this research is to find effective factors for improving social sustainability in housing. Initially, data collection was carried out through a library study (literature review) tools in the areas of urban planning, architecture, and residential contexts. Then next steps after literature review has been done, which were the content analysis method, data ordering, and component coding. Also, based on existing resources and studied structures on social sustainability, factors were proposed in the form of a 5-category structure. Then Delphi technique was used to validate the principles. In the first stage, questionnaires were sent to a number of specialists in the field of housing and urban planning from different universities. (Questions were about measuring the importance of each factor in social sustainability, the accuracy of each factor in the proposed category or transfer to another category or even a new category). Subsequently, by summarizing experts opinions about the structure and principles, the final edition has been made. Particularly these suggestions were about adding, removing, aggregating and segregating some of the factors, or transferring some of them to another, or replacing another name for them. For the next step, it was necessary to implement the second Delphi phase in order to send feedback and question about comments and suggestions to the experts whom answered the questionnaires in the first stage. an‎d then summarize the factors and five categories in the structure for the last time. Suggestions that were agreed upon by more than half of the experts affected the process of modifying factors and final structure. Ultimately, by re-editing and final analysis, 44 effective factors were found in social sustainability. The findings showed that the "physical desirability" and "social and cultural life" are the most significant areas for improving social sustainability. Also, the factors of "social security", "social participation" and "social interactions" from social and cultural life categories with values of 3.675, 2.904 and 1.527, respectively, were the most influential factors. "inclusive design" (for low capable- incapable), "Pedestration Axial / Bicycle Axial" and "Spatial Diversity and vitality" of the physical desirability category with the values of 1.322, 1.300 and 1.252, respectively, are the most crucial factors for developing social sustainability based on The opinion of experts. in the other word, it can be said by putting these five categories in a order by considering their importance the following result can be obtained: first, "physical desirability”, Second, "social and cultural life", Third, "function and social infrastructure", Forth and fifth (same value), “environmental" and “economic". So, it can be concluded by considering these characteristics of social sustainability and by implementing them in various fields and diverse decision making areas like architectural areas, will cause improvement in social sustainability by enhancing the quality of residential buildings.