Exploring a sustainability assessment tool for big scale residential area development in China-the Sustainable Residential District (SRD) Rating System

This research attempts to make a better understanding of the concept of sustainable urban residential district assessment and its role for sustainable development in China. Moreover, the research tries to establish a framework of feasible and effective sustainable residential district assessment items for China. And then, base on the framework this research will develop a Sustainable Residential District (SRD) Rating System (a computer program) to measure the performance on the sustainability issues, and thus to promote the sustainable development in the urbanization of China. Over the past 15 years, the importance of sustainable development has been recognized by the whole world. Meanwhile, in the building field many green building assessment tools such as BREEAM, LEED, CASBEE and others were established in many developed countries. Now, these assessment tools have developed various versions for different building styles and scales, and the assessment tools for area residential development is latest version in BREEAM, LEED and CASBEE. On the other hand, with the fast urbanization a lot of big scale residential developments such as new town projects emerge in China in recent years, which create an urgent demand for a sustainability assessment tools on the area scale. This research firstly executed a systemic analysis on the Chinese land ownership, urban planning system and residential development process, and an integrated study on the state of sustainable development and green building in China. The research identified the necessary of sustainability assessment on the area scale and discussed the possibility and benefits of the residential district as the assessment scale. Then the research made a comparison and deep analysis of the three existing assessment tool for residential area scale, LEED for Neighborhood Development, BREEAM Communities and CASBEE for Urban Development, and built an initial framework of assessment items respecting the local context of China. And then the initial framework were improved and determined through questionnaires with 60 respondents: 50% of them were experts and 50% were laymen. With the help of the software of Expert Choice based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology, the weighting system of the final assessment items was established. The outcome of this research was a suggested Sustainable Residential District (SRD) Rating System (a computer program). With this tool, four residential district developments in China were assessed. The results were used to test its practicability and usefulness and to analyze the sustainability performance of Chinese residential district development. According to the feedback from the involved experts, the suggested assessment tool can assist the participants of residential district development in China to make a general and clearer view of the residential district projects on the sustainability issues and further to improve the overall sustainability performance.