The Indoor Exposome: Air Quality, Ventilation, and the Built Environment

People spend up to 90% of their lives indoors — yet indoor air quality (IAQ) remains a blind spot in health policy, planning, and research. Unlike outdoor air pollution, indoor environments are shaped by a complex interaction of building design, ventilation systems, occupant behaviour, socioeconomic conditions, and governance structures that cut across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries. Residential homes — from high-specification new builds to informal settlements and self-built housing — workplaces, schools, hospitals, public transport, and civic buildings each present distinct exposure profiles and regulatory challenges. Meanwhile, growing evidence connects indoor air pollutants — from particulate matter, dust, and volatile organic compounds to CO2 build-up and biological contaminants — to significant respiratory, cardiovascular, and cognitive health burdens. As the built environment faces intensifying pressures from climate change, densification, and energy efficiency retrofits, understanding and improving IAQ has never been more urgent or more complex.Scope and Information for AuthorsThis Research Topic invites contributions that interrogate indoor air quality as a critical, underexplored dimension of sustainability and public health. We are particularly interested in research that moves beyond technical measurement to engage with the social, behavioural, political, and spatial dimensions of indoor exposure, and with the difficult trade-offs that shape real-world IAQ outcomes.We welcome submissions that address:• Different indoor space typologies — residential homes (including informal settlements and self-built housing), workplaces, public buildings, transport environments, educational settings, and healthcare facilities, and the distinct IAQ challenges each presents.• Ventilation and ventilation practices — natural, mechanical, and hybrid strategies; the management of effective ventilation across different climates; and the gap between designed and actual performance in use.• Managing trade-offs — between thermal comfort, energy costs, and adequate ventilation; between opening windows to dilute airborne pathogens and admitting outdoor pollution; between airtight retrofits for decarbonisation and the IAQ risks they can create.• Retrofit technologies and building stock — the relationship between building age, construction materials, energy efficiency standards, retrofitting interventions, and indoor pollution.• HVAC, smart buildings, and BIM — the role of mechanical systems, building information modelling, sensor networks, and automation in monitoring and managing IAQ in real time.• Busy and shared spaces — managing CO2 in occupied rooms, resuspension of dust and particles from movement over carpets and soft furnishings, and exposure dynamics in densely used environments.• Dust — sources, composition, and health implications of household and workplace dust as a persistent and often-overlooked exposure pathway.• Occupant behaviours and their impact — including cooking, cleaning, ventilation practices, heating choices, and the role of awareness and habit in shaping indoor exposure.• Public understanding and risk perception — how individuals and communities understand, respond to, and communicate about indoor air quality risks.• Health inequalities and environmental justice — how IAQ burdens are unevenly distributed across income, tenure, ethnicity, age, and disability, and what this means for health equity.• Regulatory challenges — the fragmented, inconsistent, and often absent governance frameworks for indoor air quality across different building types and jurisdictions.• Measurement challenges — methodological innovations and limitations in monitoring IAQ, including low-cost sensors, citizen science approaches, and the difficulties of standardising indoor exposure assessment.• Links to the Sustainable Development Goals — particularly SDG 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), and SDG 13 (Climate Action).• The indoor exposome — integrated approaches to understanding the totality of indoor environmental exposures and their cumulative effects on human health across the life course.We welcome empirical studies, systematic and narrative reviews, policy analyses, methodological papers, and transdisciplinary explorations. Contributions from low- and middle-income contexts, and from settings dominated by informal or self-built housing, are especially encouraged.Goal:This Research Topic aims to build a rigorous, policy-relevant body of evidence on indoor air quality as a defining challenge for sustainable, equitable communities. Despite the scale of the health burden attributable to indoor air pollution, it remains under-regulated, under-measured, and poorly understood by the public and policymakers alike. By bringing together researchers across building science, environmental health, public policy, architecture, engineering, behavioural science, and data science, this collection seeks to advance both the science and the governance of indoor environments.We particularly encourage contributions that go beyond technical analysis to engage with the lived experiences of residents, the practical trade-offs faced by building managers and occupants, the institutional barriers to effective regulation, and the structural inequalities that shape who is most exposed and least protected. Our goal is to position indoor air quality — and the ventilation strategies, technologies, and behaviours that shape it — as a central pillar of the sustainability agenda, connecting housing policy, climate action, public health, and social justice. Ultimately, we hope this Research Topic will equip researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with the evidence and frameworks needed to make indoor environments healthier and more equitable for all.Topic Editor James Evans is a Director and shareholder in Urban 360 Ltd. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject. Topic editors: James Evans, Roberto Alonso González-Lezcano, Prashant Kumar, Rehan Sadiq, Dr. Sunil K. Sansaniwal Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81648/the-indoor-exposome-air-quality-ventilation-and-the-built-environment