A Literature Review on Sustainable Buildings and Neighborhoods in Terms of Daylight, Solar Energy and Human Factors

Abstract

Sustainability has become the focus and interest of researchers with climate change's increasing impact and challenges. Considering various perspectives, published studies focus on sustainability in architecture and the built environment, such as using daylight more effectively, enhancing energy efficiency, and designing nearly zero-energy buildings. Given the attention to sustain- ability in this domain, this review assesses the abovementioned viewpoints in buildings regarding environmental factors in relation to the micro and macro scales of the buildings and neighborhoods. Human factor has increasingly been of interest in recent works of sustainable environments. This study identifies the gaps with respect to architectural design elements considering daylighting, energy efficiency and human factors on building and neighborhood scales. A comprehensive table of the reviewed studies summarizes the aim, methodology, optimization algorithm, objective function, machine learning algorithm, digital tools, location, independent and dependent variables, view, wellness, well-being, daylight/energy performance metrics, scale, and solar strategy. The results showed that the current state-of-the-art focus on energy efficiency mainly considers passive design strategies at the building scale. Studies in the daylight domain primarily consider window properties, shading devices, and orientation. Human-centric studies showed that daylighting improves the emotional well-being of building occupants but can have negative effects such as overheating and glare. Overall findings emphasize the necessity of a holistic approach in achieving sustainability goals in dwellings at the building and neighborhood scale.