Creating Cultural Innovation: Towards a holistic approach in shaping a sustainable future

This paper presents a review on holistic approaches of green building assessment tools (GBAT) for sustainable development (SD) showing the trends and conceptual framework. The method of the study is through literature review which highlighted the socio-cultural inadequacy of most GBAT. The paper proposes several hypotheses. Firstly, to use a holistic universal method to assess sustainability within the community's cultural context. Secondly, the assessment criteria for sustainability from the socio-cultural viewpoint would differ from the conventional tools. Thirdly, the study proposes that the community would prefer to shape their future environment with specific preferred values in their home environment. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.