Healthy building design strategies: A cross-topic systematic review

Abstract

Buildings play a crucial role in human health. While past literature reviews have focused on specific aspects of building for health, like indoor environmental quality, a comprehensive understanding of healthy building strategies, especially those relevant to early-stage design, remains limited across domain areas. This study presents a systematic, cross-topic review of design strategies for healthy buildings and cities, analyzing over 100 papers across ten categories (over a decade) using a structured search. By focusing on earlier-stage solutions, the study highlights their pivotal role in shaping building performance. Our analysis reveals that research intensity varies significantly across categories, with ventilation, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality receiving the most attention. Meanwhile, while computational and simulation methods dominate research approaches, their practical implementation often falls short. Underlying data and codebases are often not made public. This review also identifies critical gaps, such as the dearth of validation of computational methods in real-world applications, the limited scalability and generalizability of many studies, a lag in the move toward open science, insufficient consideration of long-term impacts, and geographical concentration of research in developed regions.