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For the sake of public health and safety, a territory‐wide evaluation of the quality of buildings in Hong Kong is crucial. However, it is a lengthy process to assess the performance of the whole stock of buildings in the city. To get around this predicament, this paper aims to propose a statistical approach for a fast and reliable building evaluation algorithm using the Building Quality Index (BQI) developed by The University of Hong Kong.

Using the BQI assessment framework, the condition of 133 and 160 private apartment buildings in Yau Tsim Mong and the Eastern District respectively are assessed and rated. The data of the Yau Tsim Mong buildings are used to estimate a regression model associating the relationships between building performance, measured by the BQI, and other exogenous factors. The resulting model is then employed to predict the performance of the surveyed buildings in the Eastern District.

The regression analyses on the Yau Tsim Mong data indicate that building age, development scale and building management mode are significant determinants of the existing condition of the sampled buildings, echoing the findings of previous studies. BQI scores of buildings in the Eastern District are estimated using the resulting regression model, and there is a highly positive relationship between the predicted BQI and in‐situ BQI scores.

The study is the first in the literature to provide an algorithm for estimating building condition in a densely developed high‐rise urban area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine links between environmental design of high-rise housing communities and residents’ perceptions about antisocial behaviour (ASB).

A conceptual framework was proposed to investigate correlations between architectural design parameters and perceived severity of ASB activity. A questionnaire was administered to test the relationships. Residents of 14 public rental housing estates in Hong Kong participated, and 422 complete responses were analysed.

Strong correlation was discovered between elements of residential design and residents’ perceptions of ASB severity. Block layout, building height and number of flats per floor affected residents’ feelings about ASB threat. Access to outside air in communal corridors also significantly reduced residents’ complaints about ASB.

This study offers insights into how architectural design of high-rise residences might reduce residents’ perception of ASB severity. Findings impact current ASB research, but also architects’ and developers’ designs. Better planned built environments will enhance residents’ security and satisfaction, reinforcing communities.

Previous studies have ignored whether architectural design of high-rises could directly influence residents’ perception of ASB severity. This study is the first to focus on the relationship.

This paper aims to study neighbourhood attachment and satisfaction in a middle-class, high-density and semi-gated neighbourhood in Hong Kong.

Drawing on the findings of survey on 356 households, a principal component analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were conducted to assess how attachment and satisfaction were manifested and whether they were manifested as separate phenomena.

Attachment and satisfaction in neighbourhoods were manifested as separate phenomena. It was further found that residents were broadly attached to and satisfied with their neighbourhood. Of the neighbourhood characteristics identified as influencing satisfaction in previous research, the support was found only for the physical environment and safety but concluded that satisfaction was also influenced by status, neighbourhood youths’ ambition and schools. Contrary to the expectation, the authors did not find support for deeper social bonds as an element of satisfaction. The hierarchical regression analysis indicated that satisfaction may lead to increased attachment.

This study offers policymakers and housing managers’ valuable insights into the management of increasingly large and complex residential neighbourhoods. It helps us understand which initiatives are likely to lead to greater attachment.

Previous studies have focused on neighbourhood attachment and satisfaction in typical low/medium-density settings. This study extends previous efforts to a high-density housing estate of Hong Kong.

The most fundamental requirement of a habitable building is that its occupants can live in it healthily and safely. However, given the proliferation of building‐related accidents recently in Hong Kong, the extent to which our buildings have fulfilled this basic requirement is doubtful. For the benefit of the entire society, more public information on building quality is needed. Aims to address this issue.

This paper extends the Ho et al. assessment model to evaluate the combined health and safety performance of residential buildings in Hong Kong. The model consists of a set of performance‐based objectives and can be translated into a hierarchy of parameters concerning the quality of building design, building management, and the surrounding environment. A total of 99 residential buildings in two urban areas, namely Mongkok and Tsimshatsui, were assessed with the help of a simple and user‐friendly performance indicator called the Building Quality Index (BQI).

The comparative analysis showed that the overall health and safety performance varied significantly with building age and development scale. Building location did not matter in overall performance, but became relevant in disaggregate performances regarding the external environment and building management approaches.

In theory, building management and building location are not related. Further research is needed to disentangle the management effect from the location effect.

The assessment method is a simple and cost‐effective screening tool for mass building assessment at the city level. It can also be used for classifying buildings into different grades in respect of health and safety, providing incentives to building owners, developers, and government bodies to improve the living environment.

The study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between building performance and its physical characteristics, including location, age, and development scale, in a densely populated high‐rise urban area.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine whether public knowledge of poor conditions of multi‐storey residential buildings affected the sale prices of these properties based on an analysis of panel data in Hong Kong.

Previous studies suggested that physical conditions of residential properties, particularly those concerning communal areas and services, might not be fully priced by the market because of the problem of information asymmetry. Therefore, it was envisaged that additional information pumped into the housing market could alter the price gradient between high‐quality and low‐quality properties. In November 2000, the Hong Kong Government publicly announced a list of poorly‐performing buildings, and this study aims to examine whether the blacklisting exercise brought about negative impacts on the sale prices of the affected properties. Hedonic price analysis was conducted on a set of panel data which consists of property transactions in both blacklisted and non‐blacklisted buildings.

The analysis results showed that properties in blacklisted buildings were not transacted at a discount, compared with those in non‐blacklisted buildings before the blacklisting exercise. Also, the release of public information on the blacklist did not create a relative diminution of the property prices of the blacklisted buildings.

Thin property transactions in derelict buildings limited the number of observations for running the regression analysis.

The piecemeal blacklisting exercise could not create price differential in the housing market, and thus it was not possible for the Hong Kong Government to lure homeowners to invest in their properties by market forces. The government should consider the implementation of a territory‐wide building classification scheme or other alternatives to solve the problems of building disrepair.

This study is the first attempt to empirically investigate the value diminution effects of the government's blacklisting against dilapidation buildings.

Proper management and maintenance of building stock are vital to sustainable development of a city for a number of reasons, for example, the close relationship between building performance and residents' health. However, effective housing management requires active participation of the residents, particularly the homeowners. Yet, homeowners' participation in housing management in Hong Kong is claimed to remain at a low level because of its voluntary nature. This paper aims to empirically explore the determinants of participation behaviour of homeowners in private housing management in the city based on survey findings.

Founded on the literature reviewed, an analytic model for explaining homeowners' participation behaviour in housing management is developed. The model is then tested by means of logit regression with the data collected from a structured questionnaire survey conducted in summer 2009. A total of 346 respondents from 53 private multi‐storey residential buildings in the western district were surveyed.

In general, older, better educated and less wealthy homeowners are active participants in building management matters, keeping other things constant. Sense of community is also found to be a significant determinant. Besides, homeowners' approach towards building care is predominantly reactive since they engage in housing management because of their dissatisfaction with building quality. The findings of the research will provide valuable insights to public administrators for formulating better policies on private housing management.

The analysis results pose a positive view towards the effects of the communitarian approach to avoid free‐riding problems in housing management. In order to heighten the participation rate of homeowners in private housing management, local authorities or other public bodies can try to boost homeowners' sense of community within their residential communities.

This study is the first attempt to empirically investigate the determinants of homeowners' participation in the management of high‐rise residential buildings in Hong Kong.

The paper's objective is to empirically study the effects of building refurbishment on the prices of the dwelling units in a contiguous housing estate in Hong Kong.

In a congested living environment like Hong Kong, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a view unobstructed by buildings. As such, the quality of views is dependent on the aesthetic quality of surrounding buildings. It is likely that poorly maintained buildings will impose negative visual effects on their immediate surroundings. Refurbishing these poor buildings should, therefore, reduce or even counter this negative externality. To study the positive externality brought about by building refurbishment, a hedonic price analysis was conducted on a set of panel data consisting of property transactions in a large housing estate located in Pokfulam. This estate was chosen because its adjoining buildings underwent refurbishment in 1998.

The results showed that the refurbishment increased significantly the prices of those properties which faced refurbished buildings, keeping other things constant. The increments, on average, amounted 6.6 per cent of the prices of the properties.

Building refurbishment can have various scopes and scales but this study did not consider how the characteristics of the building refurbishment affected the prices of neighbourhood properties.

Given the problems of aging buildings in most urban areas, the results presented significant practical implications for building refurbishment and urban renewal as a whole. Developers or property owners may be lured to invest in the refurbishment of adjacent dilapidated properties with a view to enhancing the values of their own properties.

Although previous studies analytically suggested that building refurbishment created positive externality, this study is the first attempt to explore this connection.

The responsibility for ensuring the safety and standard of building works in Hong Kong has long rested with the government. In 2003, the government proposed a new control regime to streamline the process of building proposal approval by allowing private‐sector practitioners to certify certain types of minor building works. The purpose of this paper is to consider the likely effectiveness of the proposed regime by examining the views of local building professionals.

Following an overview of the government's initiative in private certification of building works, a literature review is conducted to collate the collective views of the local professional institutions about the proposals. A total of 90 local architects, building surveyors and structural engineers in the private and public sectors are then interviewed using a structured questionnaire.

The proposed regime is generally perceived as having the capacity to speed up the process of building proposal approval whilst also improving overall standards of building performance in Hong Kong. Concerns are however expressed about the clarity of the definition of minor works, and about the level of professional competence of the private certifiers. The respondents also expressed further general concern over the adequacy of government support offered to the private certifiers under the proposed system.

Stakeholders of the proposed minor works regime are not confined to building professionals such as architects, engineers and building surveyors, but also include contractors and the general public as a whole. Owing to limited resources, only the views of the local building professionals are solicited.

The findings of this study provide valuable insights for public administrators into the design and subsequent operation of the new regime. They will also assist the Hong Kong Government in making more informed decisions about the future streamlining of the building control system without, at the same time, sacrificing the overall building safety of the city.

This is the first published study on the views of building professionals from different professional backgrounds on the proposed private certification regime.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel tenant mix model for shopping malls based on an analogy from ecological theories.

This study empirically investigates the tenant species‐area relationship and tenant species‐abundance distribution in shopping malls. In this study, the tests on species‐area relationship and species‐abundance distribution in shopping malls are derived from ecological theories. Empirical tests by a sample of 18 shopping malls for the species‐area relationship and of five malls for the species‐abundance distribution are carried out in Hong Kong

It shows that, in line with the findings of biogeography, the tenant species‐area relationship follows a power law of exponent of about 0.20. Furthermore, the species‐abundance distributions of the five large‐scale malls are found to be closely in track with a geometric distribution as commonly found in ecology. These results imply that tenant mix strategies are governed by two principles: the number of tenant species is related to the mall size; and the shop area allocation follows a geometric distribution.

The study provides the first quantitative tenant mix model on the number of tenant species in a particular mall size, and on the tenant species abundance distribution pattern. These results provide far‐reaching implications for research and practice, including a quantitative benchmarking of tenant mix strategy and an optimal design of shopping malls.

The model is the first tenant mix model for practitioners to formulate quantitative tenant mix strategy, and evaluate the effects of tenant mix on the performance of a shopping mall.

It is the first quantitative model for tenant mix, and would open up a novel agenda for research on tenant mix strategies.

Behavioral pattern mining for intelligent system such as SmEs sensor data are vitally important in many applications and performance optimizations. Sensor pattern mining (SPM) is also dynamic and a hot research issue to pervasive and ubiquitous of smart technologies toward improving human life. However, in large-scale sensor data, exploring and mining pattern, which leads to detect the abnormal behavior is challenging. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Sensor data are complex and multivariate, for example, which data captured by the sensors, how it is precise, what properties are recorded or measured, are important research issues. Therefore, the method, the authors proposed Sequential Data Mining (SDM) approach to explore pattern behaviors toward detecting abnormal patterns for smart space fault diagnosis and performance optimization in the intelligent world. Sensor data types, modeling, descriptions and SPM techniques are discussed in depth using real sensor data sets.

The outcome of the paper is measured as introducing a novel idea how SDM technique’s scale-up to sensor data pattern mining. In the paper, the approach and technicality of the sensor data pattern analyzed, and finally the pattern behaviors detected or segmented as normal and abnormal patterns.

The paper is focussed on sensor data behavioral patterns for fault diagnosis and performance optimizations. It is other ways of knowledge extraction from the anomaly of sensor data (observation records), which is pertinent to adopt in many intelligent systems applications, including safety and security, efficiency, and other advantages as the consideration of the real-world problems.