Print Email Facebook Twitter Lifespan assessment of dwellings Title Lifespan assessment of dwellings Author Thomsen, A.F. (TU Delft OLD Housing Quality and Process Innovation) Straub, A. (TU Delft Public Commissioning) Date 2018 Abstract What is the average lifespan of dwellings?Though of decisive importance for the provision, maintenance and management of housing stocks, and despite a choice of research papers about the subject, the last word about this question is far from said.At first a distinction should be made between the technical lifespan and the functional service life. The technical lifespan is decisive for the physical existence of a dwelling, the service life for the length of time that a dwelling fulfils the functional needs of households.This distinction is not always clear in the available research sources which show a wide range of approaches, varying from ex-ante assessment of the physical condition and estimation of the residual technical lifespan, financial analyses of the profitable service life and/or depreciation period through ex-post mortality analyses in analogy to human mortality. Most ex-ante approaches start from a limited scope; an all-encompassing interdisciplinary approach is missing. On the other hand ex-post analyses suffer from the fact that – in contrary of human populations – buildings are man-made, -managed and -demolished; the vast majority of housing stocks is very young and consistent longitudinal series are missing. As a result, none of these approaches leads up to now to useful results, let alone reliable predictions.As the technical lifespan of a dwelling as a whole strongly depends on its numerous different components, knowledge of technical lifespans of dwellings and building component is also of decisive importance for ex-ante environmental life cycle assessments and life cycle cost calculations.Based on an overview of the available sources, the paper discusses the pros and cons of the existing knowledge, possible improvements and alternatives. Subject LifespanDwellingsHousing managementHousing StatisticsObsolescence To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4f2765ac-9e06-43a0-813b-9763f3ab49e3 Publisher ENHR Embargo date 2019-01-01 Source Conference papers of the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR 2018): More together, more apart: Migration, densification, segregation Event ENHR Conference 2018, 2018-06-26 → 2018-06-29, Uppsala, Sweden Bibliographical note Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public. Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights © 2018 A.F. Thomsen, A. Straub Files PDF ENHR18_Thomsen_Straub_3_.pdf 450.63 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:4f2765ac-9e06-43a0-813b-9763f3ab49e3/datastream/OBJ/view