Abstract
Sustainable development is inconceivable without healthy real estate market. A housing project can be regarded as sustainable only when all the dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, and social) are dealt with. There has been an increased interest in using sustainability indicators for evaluating the impacts of the new development projects. Although international literature is rich in sustainability assessments, there are no tools developed for assessment of new residential projects in the specific context of the Baltic States. Therefore, the aim of this article is to fill this gap and to propose an integrated, hierarchically structured system of sustainability indicators to be used for assessment of the new housing development projects. This aim is achieved through accomplishing three objectives. First, based on a review of literature related to assessing building project performance and sustainable development in construction, the paper proposes an original hierarchically structured system of sustainability indicators suitable for the Baltic context. Second, based on a survey of experts, significances of criteria are estimated by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. Finally, paper proposes recommendations to government authorities and real estate developers as to how to enhance the performance of new residential projects according to the principles of sustainability.
Highlights
In Brundtland’s report [1], sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.In general, sustainable development encompasses three interacting dimensions: environmental, economic and social.It is widely accepted that the construction sector is one of the main contributors to sustainable development, and its role in encouraging environmental protection, economic growth, and social progress is undeniable [2]
Literature review revealed that Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a useful method for weighting sustainability indicators as: (1) AHP has the characteristics of a hierarchical structure, which is aligned with the structures of most sustainability frameworks and makes the process easy to comprehend for stakeholders; (2) is simple and flexible; (3) provides a consistent verification operation; and (4) this method can be used with both qualitative and quantitative data [43,44]
3000 papers concerning multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in the environmental field were identified by Cegan et al [57]
Summary
In Brundtland’s report [1], sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.In general, sustainable development encompasses three interacting dimensions: environmental, economic and social.It is widely accepted that the construction sector is one of the main contributors to sustainable development, and its role in encouraging environmental protection, economic growth, and social progress is undeniable [2]. In Brundtland’s report [1], sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Sustainable development encompasses three interacting dimensions: environmental, economic and social. It is widely accepted that the construction sector is one of the main contributors to sustainable development, and its role in encouraging environmental protection, economic growth, and social progress is undeniable [2]. As Holmstedt et al [3] claim, “urban sustainable development is today seen as one of the keys towards unlocking the quest for a sustainable world”. One of the key sectors in achieving sustainable development is residential construction. Housing development projects had mainly concentrated on the technical and financial feasibility. Research by Zhang et al [4] revealed that
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