Today, about 25 members of the Build4People team from Germany and Cambodia discussed the preliminary results of a large-scale household survey among 500 households of the urban population of Phnom Penh.
The rationale behind the survey was to learn more about the building user perspective in the context of resource and energy consumption, feeling of thermal comfort and mechanical cooling habits, environmental awareness, behaviour patterns and attitudes.
Each B4P Work Package had contributed questions to this multi-disciplinary joint survey under the lead of the environmental psychologists from Magdeburg University, responsible for Build4People Work Package #1 “Behaviour Change” and with logistic support from Work Package #7 “Coordination, Communication & Dissemination”.
This Build4People Roundtable Workshop served following aims:
- Introduction of the preliminary results of the large-scale Build4People household survey
- Discussion of results together with the local research partners to get feedback in regard of local political, socio-economic and cultural context
- Lessons learnt from Build4People household survey in regard of methodology and design of future surveys
- Discussion of further steps of analysis
- Preliminary discussion on how to publish Build4People household survey results by different author teams
During the half-day workshop intense discussions took place together with the local research partners. For example, in regard of methodology, it was discussed how to avoid the “tendency to the middle” of questions with a Likert scale including 5 answering options. Another question raised was how to deal with the urban citizen’s preference to live in the traditional shophouse typology with commercial use of the ground-floor in the city-centre or in a borey row-house typology in the urban periphery, both with specific disadvantages in terms of urban sustainability. To support those wishes would be a people-led policy and enhance the individual quality of life of those people but it would also lead to a decrease of the overall urban sustainability and further decrease the urban quality of life of the urban marginalized who are not able to realise their housing needs due to financial constraints.
