Social problems of green buildings: From the humanistic needs to social acceptance

In the past few decades, scholars have conducted research and held discussions on green building to highlight their vital significance in addressing environmental, economic and social challenges. It is recognized that public attitudes and views towards green building may affect its application in daily lives, although studies on consumers׳ cognition are rarely carried out. The social problems related to green building such as consumers׳ basic understanding, purchase intention, social and humanistic needs, public attitudes and behaviors, rebound effects and furthermore social acceptance are therefore studied, based on three research methods including literature review, questionnaire and inductive analysis. Through the analysis, following results can be obtained: (i) green building׳s sustainable design has quite important influence over consumers׳ decision making process. The general public maintains a high regard for the advantages of green building, where better ventilation and lighting is a major benefit, saving energy and water are the second rated, and then land and construction material saving. (ii) Although the general public is not being familiar with the concept of green building, the majority of participants would pay more for green buildings over the standard building when they know the environmental impacts of them. (iii) Green building should not only be limited to energy performance-oriented, but also be user-oriented, the social and humanistic needs model is thus well established based on Maslow׳s Hierarchy of Needs. In the life cycle of green building, social and humanistic needs show a trend of dynamics, which means social processes with consumer engagement and participation needs to be considered in aspects of conceptual design, planning and design, operation and maintenance to improve users׳ happiness and productivity. (iv)Current user-oriented solutions to green building are always based on a hypothesis that consumers are readily motivated or prefer expensive goods for reducing energy use, to really reflect preference and influenced actions, social acceptance should be analyzed to fully gauge interest and perspective of the people. (v) Rebound effects of post-occupant building performance, including energy performance, human comfort, indoor environmental quality, greenhouse gas emission and workplace productivity can be divided into two stages. At present, it is necessary to establish appropriate samples, methods and parameters for an unbiased and valid post-occupant evaluation system. In addition, the social acceptance of green building framework is established based on Wüstenhagen et al. triangular model for renewable energy innovation. All the explorations to social problems of green building in this article are expected to provide a healthy social basis for the development of this green strategy.