HABITAT SAFETY EVALUATION OF SUSTAINABLE HOUSING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HOUSEHOLDS

ABSTRACT In recent years, the housing market has developed rapidly during the process of urbanization. Since people require adequate housing safety, safety challenges associated with housing have received increasing attention. Although development of sustainable housing was rapid in the last few decades, insufficient studies considered households’ needs and examined the health and psychological safety issues in sustainable housing. This study aims to establish an indicator system and develop a model to evaluate habitat safety from three dimensions: physical safety, health safety, and psychological safety. This study develops an evaluation system containing 46 indicators to assess the safety performance of sustainable housing from households’ perspectives. In addition, criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) method is combined with the Cloud Model to provide systematic and visual evaluation results. A government-funded sustainable housing project in Chongqing, China, is selected as a case study and questionnaire surveys were delivered to collect the raw data of subjective ratings on the 46 safety indicators. The following findings are observed: (1) there is a prominent demand for improvement in psychological safety of sustainable housing, followed by health safety; (2) different age groups have different safety needs; and (3) regulations and standards are very important to improve the habitat safety of sustainable housing. The study considers safety issues from households’ perspectives and introduces a different idea of human safety in sustainable housing. It provides an effective method to evaluate housing safety and could be a useful reference for further development of sustainable housing.