Development of a decision making model for sustainable building development for Hong Kong : environmental performance of building envelope

Abstract

With the increase in public awareness of environmental issues during the late 1980s and early 1990s, sustainable development is becoming one of the major policy issues of the Hong Kong SAR government. Policy makers are now facing additional challenges on how to prioritize the allocation of limited community resources in environmental issues. The most cost effective and efficient manner is through imposing statutory controls on issues that are most neglected and less focused by the developers and building designers. In achieving this, a model to predict how the developers and designers act when confronting with a set of diverse design issues is needed. Accordingly, it is the intent of this study to formulate a model to predict how designers and developers in Hong Kong will perform when they are confronted with tradeoff during a complicated design process. The model is formulated by adopting an averting expenditure approach together with multiple regression analysis to reveal the amount of money that designers and developers are willing to pay and tradeoff for various design attributes, ranging from aesthetics and acoustic performance to environmental impact. One of the most important findings from the model development is that designers and developers in Hong Kong considered the provision of an appropriate window-to-wall ratio for building envelopes is far more important than improvement on their environmental performance. Improvement in thermal performance of building envelopes will be considered only if an appropriate window-to-wall ratio has been determined. The long term significance of this study is to enhance our understanding of the behavior of developers and designers towards a diverse set of design issues. This understanding can provide insight for the policy makers to formulate a regional strategy for allocating the limited community resources in the most effective and efficient manner during their pursuit of sustainability excellence. Furthermore, the innovative and practical methodology developed for building envelopes should also be appropriate for use for revealing the amount of money that designers and developers are willing to pay for various design attributes of other building elements and building services systems.