Jingke Hong

Neighborhood sustainability in urban renewal: An assessment framework

Urban renewal provides valuable opportunities for sustainable development. Sustainability assessment is considered a useful tool in ensuring sustainable development in practice. Although a number of studies have been conducted to evaluate the potential of urban renewal, studies on sustainability assessment in urban renewal at a neighborhood scale are often ignored. However, urban renewal is normally accompanied by many social, economic, and environmental conflicts among various stakeholders. The present paper proposes a framework for assessing neighborhood sustainability to support urban renewal decision making in high-density cities such as Hong Kong. This framework includes two components: (1) sustainability and building condition and (2) a decision-making matrix for urban renewal strategies. A case study was conducted to illustrate how this framework can be applied in the decision-making process of urban renewal projects. The results are expected to provide references for urban renewal decision making in high-density cities.

Stakeholder-Based Analysis of Drivers and Constraints in the Use of Off-Site Construction

Prefabrication, standardization, pre-assembly, and modularization, which are collectively termed off-site production, have become popular with recent developments in design and information technology. These construction methods provide numerous opportunities to improve productivity and enhance sustainability performance in the construction industry. The potential benefits and barriers in the use of off-site production are broadly discussed to justify the use of prefabrication. However, what remains lacking is a systematic identification of factors with consideration of associated stakeholders to gain an in-depth understanding of potential merits and shortcomings of prefabrication in a particular construction environment. This study presents a toolkit with the help of stakeholder analysis to determine the key drivers and constraints in off-site production. This study presents in detail the benefits and constraints in the use of prefabrication in the Hong Kong construction industry. Based on an extensive research review of the Hong Kong construction industry and a background of the increasing interest in prefabrication as a construction solution, this study reinforces the need for informed decisions, which have auditable processes, in deriving the key driving and constraint factors for off-site construction methods to ensure complete understanding of these drivers and constraints. The study is valuable because it explores a new and effective way to identify key drivers and constraints in the use of off-site construction by considering potential related stakeholders and interrelationships that underlie various driving and constraint factors.

Life Cycle Assessment of Green Buildings: A Case Study in China

Due to the negative impact on the environment, particularly in terms of energy consumption and environmental load, the construction industry is the focus of attention for many researchers. By using life cycle assessment method, this study found the life cycle energy performance of a green office building in China in order to examine the achievements of green building technology and to identify the key points of green building construction and operation. After analyzing five scenarios, the result shows that the embodied energy of the case study office building ranged from 2.52 to 9.76 GJ/m 2 , and the operation energy was 0.21 GJ/m 2 yr. The findings suggest that it is necessary to use materials with high embodied energy intensity or frequent usage rate to conserve energy during the construction phase of a building, and to adopt energy saving equipment and new energy sources during occupation.

Current Approaches for Embodied Carbon Assessment of Buildings in China: An Overview

In China, the building sector, as a pillar industry of China’s modern economy, plays a vital role in generating carbon emissions, which is responsible for about 40% of the national total carbon emissions. To provide insights into the current carbon assessment practice of buildings in China, this chapter conducted an overview of current policies and industry initiatives promulgated for building carbon reduction and approaches currently being used to assess embodied carbon of buildings in China. To address the issues that are related to quantify embodied carbon of buildings under different scales, this chapter introduces assessment approaches and uncertainty analysis methods from both the macro and micro perspectives. The results show that the current focus of China is still on the buildings’ operational carbon reduction rather than the embodied phase. Such policy orientation does not match the increasing role of embodied carbon reduction in the creation of sustainability in the building sector. In China, the single-region input-output analysis (SRIO), multiregional input-output analysis (MRIO), and structural path analysis (SPA) are commonly used to assess embodied carbon at the macro level, while the process-based and hybrid LCA models are dominant in micro-level analysis. Although the process-based approach is most frequently used for embodied carbon assessment of buildings, a clear trend can be observed that the relevant studies gradually shift their focus from process-based individual cases to a more hybrid and macro sense in China.

Embodied Cultivated Land Use in the Urbanization Process within Guangdong Province

Urbanization has put forward a higher request for the cultivated land protection in China. Interprovincial virtual cultivated land circulation embodied in interregional trade plays an important role in achieving interregional cultivated land demand-supply equilibrium. As an important trade province, Guangdong is selected as a case to systematically reveal the impacts of interregional trade on cultivated land distributions based on a multiregional input-output model. This paper measures the embodied cultivated land flows hidden in regional consumption and interregional trade in Guangdong province and locates the cultivated land transfer from resource-intensive places to consumption-intensive places. The results show that Agriculture Sector and Food Processing Sector are the two main drivers of cultivated land embodied in consumption to meet the increasing food demand in Guangdong. With respect to regional responsibility transfer, Guizhou, Guangxi, Hebei, Hubei and Hunan contribute most to Guangdong’s rapid urbanization at the expense of their own cultivated land resources. Meanwhile, Guangdong should take more responsibility as a net importer of cultivated land resources and consider the ecological impact in its own regional trade policy.