Standardized residential building design in China : major developers' practice of design standardization in residential property development

Abstract

In the past 20 years, the growth of the real estate industry both supports and relies on the urbanization processes of China and has provided opportunities and challenges to developers. In order to seize opportunities and avoid risks, to achieve a rapid project development mechanism, developers have started to repeatedly use pre-determined project positioning framework and prepared corresponding design deliverables since the early 2000s. Prior research has explored the aims, pros, cons, situation, and developers' preparation and application processes of design standardization. However, little empirical study has been conducted in previous research, and most prior research investigates the use of design standardization from the perspective of the developer. Therefore, this research was designed to 1) quantify the degree and situation, 2) to understand the associated correlating factors, and to 3) gain perspectives of multi-stakeholders of design standardization. The main results show the overall degree of the use of design standardization is 57.3%, and there are major design strategies and varieties of differences in developers' application of standardized designs. The use of design standardization is related to project positioning at the project level, the developer's development volume at the organizational level, and the land area and population density at the societal level. This research also summarized stakeholders' insights on the aims, pros and cons, estimations, and expectations of the use of design standardization. This research has attained its research objectives, contributed to advance the knowledge of design standardization, and draw valuable policy and practical implications.