Designing more sustainable buildings requires a definition of sustainability that responds to the local context. In a South African housing project, this means addressing urgent economic and social priorities as well as environmental issues. This requires in a more comprehensive and holistic set of building performance objectives and criteria than are normally used in green building projects.

To illustrate this I presented an example set to students working on the 2024 City Centre Sustainable Housing Competition. This included sustainable performance objectives, characteristics, systems, criteria and targets within the areas of energy, water, waste, materials, biocapacity, transport, resource use, management, products and services, local economy, access, health, education, inclusion and social cohesion.

The presentation showed how a sustainable building framework could be used to develop targets, which combined with an iterative design process, modelling and simulation, could be used to develop evidence-based sustainable designs.