Measuring social sustainability on university campuses: A proposal for an indicator-based approach

One of the three dimensions of sustainable development, social sustainability, is more abstract and challenging to understand and measure compared to the other dimensions, namely environmental and economic sustainability. This situation is the main reason for the lesser-known status of social sustainability and the limited number of studies in the literature. However, achieving sustainable development requires comprehensive consideration of all dimensions together. This study aims to address social sustainability within an objective and measurable framework. Existing assessment tools used to measure sustainability in the built environment include some social components, but they are limited in scope. Therefore, a proposed indicator-based assessment tool for social sustainability has been developed to address social sustainability from a holistic perspective. The 'campus' scale, which shares many similarities with cities, has been deemed suitable for implementing this assessment tool. Due to the context-specific nature of social sustainability components, it is important for the social sustainability indicators in the assessment tool to be locally relevant. To this end, the indicators in the developed campus social sustainability assessment tool, specific to Turkey, were determined through the participation of students, academics, and administrative staff from different universities in Turkey. The identified indicators were mutually evaluated and their weights were determined by experts in the field of campus sustainability using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. With the weighted indicators, a proposed assessment tool has been developed that can easily determine the social sustainability levels of all campuses in Turkey.