Environmental Impacts of Housing Form

This project assesses the holistic life cycle environmental impacts of housing forms and evaluates different engineering design, planning, and policies to mitigate them.

Status: Current

Research themes: Energy and GHG emissions

Research areas: Building design and retrofits for performance improvement

Project Objective

Approach

Life cycle assessment was used to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions of four housing forms (detached houses, attached houses, low-rise and high-rise multi-unit residential buildings) in the City of Toronto. We aggregated the per capita GHG emissions to housing form and neighborhood levels and statistically analyze the GHG emissions with built environment and socioeconomic characteristics.  

Findings

The framework supports future housing life cycle assessment in terms of selecting appropriate functional units, scoping system boundaries, and incorporating temporal uncertainty and contextual circumstances underlying housing projects. The findings from the life cycle assessment will inform planners of the types of housing forms and characteristics of the built environment (e.g., mix-used development, transport oriented-development) that results in the lowest GHG emissions comparatively.