Abstract
As an essential part of a city, community is significant to the sustainable development of the city. At present, research on community sustainability assessment systems is relatively scarce. The existing community sustainability assessment systems often lack integrated consideration of community sustainability. For example, these systems especially place emphasis on the ecological and environmental aspects, but the economic and social aspects of sustainability are partially ignored. In order to comprehensively evaluate the sustainability of a community, this paper draws on the “participatory philosophy” and constructs an integrated assessment indicator system that includes five dimensions: environment; economy; society; institution; and culture. On this basis, a new hybrid evaluation method based on analytical hierarchy process (AHP)-entropy weight and the cloud model is proposed to evaluate community sustainability. This method combines AHP and the entropy weight method to determine index weight, thus making full use of their respective advantages. At the same time, it makes use of the superiority of the cloud model to transform qualitative remarks into quantitative representations and to reflect fuzziness and randomness. To verify the feasibility of this method, a case study is carried out on the “Minxinjiayuan” public rental housing community in Chongqing, China. The results show that the overall sustainability of the community lies between the “middle” and “good” level, and closer to the “middle” level. The level of the economic and social sustainability is higher than that of the environmental, institutional and cultural sustainability.
Highlights
Since the concept of “sustainable development” was defined in the Brundtland Report [1] in 1987, it has gradually been accepted by organizations and governments around the world [2] and spread to a variety of disciplines
This paper attempts to establish an integrated sustainability assessment system of public rental housing communities according to the characteristics of Chinese public rental housing communities and the existing literature about community sustainability assessment (CSA) systems, which is of great significance for promoting the sustainable development of Chinese public rental housing and providing reference for the establishment of CSA systems in other countries
There are a lot of approaches be used in sustainability assessment, such as the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP), the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) method, principal component analysis (PCA) etc
Summary
Since the concept of “sustainable development” was defined in the Brundtland Report [1] in 1987, it has gradually been accepted by organizations and governments around the world [2] and spread to a variety of disciplines. Building sustainability assessment systems can help systematically evaluate the sustainability of the design, construction, operation and management stages of a building’s whole life cycle [6] It is one of the most important tools in promoting sustainable building development. China has begun large-scale public rental housing construction only in recent years It has not yet formed a sound theoretical system of the design, construction, operation and management of public rental housing community. Research into sustainability assessment systems and tools of the public rental housing community is crucial to guide Chinese. Since sustainable communities have different meanings in different regions and environments [29], this paper attempts to establish a specific sustainability assessment indicator system, including multiple dimensions of sustainability, for the Chinese public rental housing community based on previous studies, relative policy analysis and evaluator scoring. The system and method can provide a new integrated perspective for sustainability assessment, and could be a theoretical reference for the research on sustainability evaluation systems and tools of China and other countries
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