Social aspects

Quality of life (QOL) issues are becoming important parts of sustainability. Equal access to facilities and infrastructure systems that support QOL services, such as recreation, libraries, and education, is an important part of providing social equity/opportunity. Many cities explicitly address the social impacts of infrastructure. Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York City developed PLaNYC to address sustainability and resilience, and Mayor de Blasio later added social justice as an objective. Incorporating social aspects into civil engineering projects starts with assessment. This chapter addresses assessment, followed by design and construction. It describes some research done in this area and provides several resources, including a description of the social aspects in Envision. A popular social impacts tool is the corporate social responsibility reporting done by many companies. More valuable to civil engineers is the formalized lifecycle assessment methodology, which is widely used to inventory and estimate resource use.