CHAPTER 5
Canada’s Oxford Properties Group
leading by example
“If your people are happy and they have a great space and good indoor air quality, then you can focus on all the sustainability features of that space too.” MARLEE KOHN
With a significant global portfolio of properties, Oxford Properties Group offers an insight into how the concept of health and well-being is applied to the built environment in different regions and jurisdictions. Based in Toronto, Oxford owns and manages nearly US$70 billion worth of assets across Europe, the United Kingdom, North America and Australia. The WELL Health-Safety Rating was recently awarded across Oxford’s global office portfolio. This has been a relatively straight forward exercise, according to Oxford’s sustainability manager Marlee Kohn . While different regions do have varying approaches to ratings, there are a lot of synergies in health and safety protocols. “If we were going for an environmental or green building certification it would be a bit harder to do it on a global scale. While the different regions do have differences in government regulations or policies related to health, the way the certification is designed allows for different regional standards and protocols to be used where appropriate,” Kohn says.
What has been particularly interesting is the evolution of how WELL programs are perceived in different markets and how it has pushed the understanding of what well-being means and how that integrates with environmental sustainability. When WELL was first launched it was tested via sustainability managers and other sustainability and green building tools had been around for some time. There were some overlaps, such as indoor air equality, biophilia, and some community aspects, but some obvious differences. “There was some reaction from operations at first,” Kohn says. “The strategy around bringing fresh air into the building had operations alarmed about conflicts with energy efficiency. Then it was a matter of talking about how you can marry fresh air with energy efficiency and bring the E and S together.
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