Identifying sustainability components of human health and wellbeing in vernacular neighborhood of Bangladesh through the lens of sustainable sites initiative guidelines and benchmarks

Building, infrastructure or man-made landscape might have harmful impact on life quality, ecological Systems and other resources if surrounding nature and environment are not taken into account properly. The Sustainable SITES Initiative, a sustainability guidelines and benchmark standard prescribed by American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) fund, The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and the United States Botanic Garden, counts landscape as the key component which can prevent or mitigate these harmful impacts. To do so, Sustainable SITES Initiative uses specific guidelines and benchmarks for design decisions and performance monitoring in terms of sustainability. Sustainability in the vernacular human settlements in different regions of the world is explicit both in tangible and intangible aspects. Vernacular settlements in Bangladesh comply the same. Though Sustainable SITES Initiative v2 Rating System provides ten criteria for sustainability certification and monitoring, this study focuses on the criteria of ‘Human Health and Well-being’ and uses its components as tools to identify sustainability components relevant to human health and well-being in the general neighborhood pattern of vernacular settlements in Bangladesh. Findings show high availability of sustainability components in terms of human health and well-being in the neighborhood of vernacular settlements of Bangladesh along potential rooms for improvement.