Defining Habitable: A Performance-Based Approach

The term ‘habitable’ generally refers to how suitable an environment is for human occupation and use. However, there is no specific list of criteria that an environment must satisfy to be considered habitable. Recent theories of the environment – behavior relationship have provided numerous potential criteria for assessing the habitability of built environments but there is no overarching theory or framework that explains their relationship. In this paper I propose a framework for selecting and organizing environmental performance criteria according to levels of human need, organizational hierarchy, and scale of environmental system. Design professionals may benefit from this effort to structure research results in a pragmatic way and researchers may choose to focus their efforts where there are clear gaps in our knowledge of human environmental needs. Furthermore the approach may help establish legal minimum standards of habitability that are more aligned with the needs and preferences of human inhabitants.