Post-Occupancy Evaluation to Assess Value Generation in Social Housing Projects: Application in the Brazilian Context

Social housing projects (SHPs) have major social and economic importance in many developing countries, including Brazil. For this reason, it is important to assess the benefits of housing projects in terms of achieving housing programme goals. However, most postoccupancy evaluations (POE) have focused on product attributes without consideration of value generation from the perspective of the users. Indeed, previous studies in Brazil have highlighted numerous cases of SHPs failing to meet the population’s needs. The aim of this research was to develop a POE method for assessing the effectiveness of housing programmes in generating value, examining both the quality of the built environment and the achievement of project goals. This method was based on the means-end value chain conceptual model, which has been widely applied in the field of marketing. Design science research, the methodological approach adopted in this investigation, divided this study approach into five phases: (1) understanding the context of SHPs in Brazil, (2) development of data collection instruments, (3) evaluation of three SHPs, (4) comparison of the results and discussion and (5) assessment of the proposed method and reflection. The main contribution of this research is the development of a POE method that provides a comprehensive assessment that is not limited to product attributes. The method also introduces several innovations compared to traditional POE processes, namely: (1) adaptation of the means-end value chain to the context of social housing, (2) involvement of different stakeholders in the evaluation process (e.g., social workers and technical staff from funding bodies), in addition to end users, (3) flexibility for assessing projects from different housing programmes and (4) the definition of a set of constructs that are relevant for evaluating SHPs in the Brazilian context.