DEVELOPING PERFORMANCE CRITERIA FOR SELECTING SUSTAINABLE HOUSING CONSTRUCTION SYSTEMS IN EGYPT

Egypt's vision 2030 for the housing construction sector has aimed to achieve sustainable housing buildings that are able to face disasters, alleviate poverty by enhancing affordability, meet people's requirements, and improve their health and safety. Many initiatives have emerged to adopt prefabricated construction systems for Egyptian buildings. However, the decision to adopt such new construction systems for building Egyptian housing still depends on the economic performance. With the increased awareness of the beneficial effects of adopting the sustainability concept, sustainability indicators: social, environmental, and economic dimensions have become drawing the major framework of the Egyptian housing prospective vision. This research aims to identify and develop the comprehensive performance criteria that control the selection of the appropriate construction systems for building Egyptian housing. To achieve the research objective, 28 performance criteria were developed based on an in-depth review of previous studies. A questionnaire survey was conducted using the Likert Five-Scale of importance. The 28 performance criteria were divided into 4 categories (i.e., economic, environmental, social, and technical). The questionnaire targeted Egyptian housing construction practitioners from engineers, architects, designers, contractors...etc. The authors found that the most important criteria have belonged to the economic, social, and technical categories. The environmental criteria ranked lowest among the criteria. Despite that, the relative importance indices for all the environmental criteria were higher than the medium range. That indicates the increasing interest of Egyptian housing construction practitioners in environmental aspects.