Neighborhood Development Mode and Infrastructure Building as the Core of the Evaluation System

The assessment scope of the US system includes residential buildings, public facilities, and multipurpose regional spaces in the entire community. It also involves the community’s social and cultural attributes. LEED-ND, the latest and highest-level evaluation system in LEED, launched the draft in 2005 and was finalized in 2009.

The UK Evaluation System with Green Buildings and Traffic as the Core

Rapid industrialization brought certain economic benefits but led to unprecedented environmental pollution. Particularly after the London smog incident, the world’s first industrialized nation, Britain took the lead in proposing an evaluation system for green settlements. The first green building evaluation system (i.e., BREEM) was developed by the UK in 1990. The BREEM communities’ technical manual evaluation system was officially established in 2012, with the greening of communities as the evaluation object. It is one of the 15 subsystems of the BREEM evaluation system. The system focuses on evaluating green buildings and green transportation [3].

Chinese Index System with Residential and Living Environment as the Core

The construction of green communities in China started from the construction of environmental protection communities in the 1990s. It developed on the basis of the concept of foreign green communities, and the evaluation system followed the UK and US plans. The green community evaluation system represented by the UK and the US is based on the theoretical guidance of sustainable development, focusing on low-carbon design of buildings, space greening, energy conservation, and emission reduction, as well as environmental participation. Although it involves some cultural and management elements, the evaluation system’s focus is on the greening of physical space, which is a green community evaluation system that focuses on environmental landscapes.

The task of creating green communities has been proposed at the national level for the first time through the 2001-2005 National Environmental Publicity and Education Work Outline jointly promulgated by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the State Environmental Protection Administration, and the Ministry of Education in 2001. In 2005, the State Environmental Protection Administration commended 112 advanced communities on the creation of “green communities” across the country. In the same year, the national green community commendation standards and assessment methods comprised seven parts totaling 100 points: basic conditions, comprehensive environmental management, and supervision mechanism, prevention and control of community environmental pollution; clean and beautiful community environment, active environmental education; and high residents’ environmental awareness among residents. [4] After 2009, various provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions have successively issued provincial and municipal green community assessment standards accordingly and conducted green community selection activities. According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 10,000 green communities at all levels in the country, and Shenzhen ranks first nationwide with 305 green communities.

Among the many evaluation systems, the “China Ecological Settlement Technology Evaluation Manual” organized by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce Real Estate Chamber of Commerce, Tsinghua University, in association with the Ministry of Construction Science and Technology Development Promotion Center, is currently the most widely used evaluation system in China.[5] The “Assessment Manual” has undergone four subsequent editions since the first edition was promulgated in 2001. The fourth edition was renamed “China Ecological Settlement Technical Assessment Manual,” and the evaluation target changed from architecture to residential areas. Meanwhile, the fifth edition was renamed “China Green and Low-Carbon Residential Technical Assessment Manual” (hereinafter referred to as the “Manual”). As the current index system guiding the evaluation of domestic settlements, the “Manual” sets out the following six first-level indicators: (1) settlement planning and environment, (2) energy and environment, (3) indoor environmental quality, (4) residential water environment, (5) materials and resources, and (6) operation management. Moreover, the Manual considers promoting resource conservation (land, energy, water, and materials) and preventing environmental pollution as the basic goals of the residential area. It also considers science and technology as the forerunner, while promoting the formation of a technological innovation mechanism for green communities and providing a platform for transforming scientific and technological achievements into productivity. [6] The “Manual” sets the secondary indicators for the residential indoor environment and residential water resource environment, indicating the attention paid to the indoor environment and construction quality of the building. It also indicates the importance accorded to water environment protection and the intensive use of water resources.

(1) Content analysis of the “Manual”

The “Manual” sets out the following seven secondary indicators for residential sites: selection and planning, traffic, greening, air quality, acoustic environment, sunshine and light environment, and residential microenvironment. In particular, in terms of energy and environment, four secondary indicators have been established: energy conservation, conventional energy system optimization, renewable energy utilization, and reduction of the environmental impact of energy consumption. Meanwhile, four secondary indicators have been established for indoor air quality: air, thermal environment, light environment, and acoustic environment. For the residential water environment, five secondary indicators have been established: water use planning, water supply and drainage, recycled water utilization and sewage treatment, rainwater utilization, and greening and water use for waterscapes. For materials and resources, green building materials, local materials, and resource reuse facilities have been established. For interior decoration and garbage disposal, five secondary indicators exist. Meanwhile, five secondary indicators for operation management have been established: energy-saving, water-saving, greening, waste, and intelligent system. Among them, 86 sub-indices are in settlement planning and residential environment, with 12 essential items; 28 sub-indices are in energy and environment, with 11 essential items; and 94 sub-indices in indoor environmental quality, with 24 essentials items. Moreover, of the 90 sub-indexes in residential water environment, 13 items are essential, and of the 35 sub-indices in materials and resources, 4 items are essential. The 35 sub-indices have no compulsory items. On the one hand, the “Manual’s” emphasis on the necessary items of evaluation indicators can ensure the quality of the country’s green communities. On the other hand, such a setting will undoubtedly raise the threshold for constructing green communities. Among the 368 indicators in the “Manual”, most indicators are related to building evaluation, with only less than 30% related to cities and communities. Such index classification causes difficulties in completing the transition from “green building” to “green community.” Moreover, this classification will affect the classification and guiding role of green communities in a certain sense due to the large number of indicators and wide coverage.

(2) Comment on the “Manual”

As the most influential green community evaluation index system in China, the “Manual” fully draws on the following: the LEED evaluation system (the US), the BREEM system (the UK), the ecological building guideline LNB (Germany), the NABERS environment evaluation system (Australia), GBTools (Canada), ESCALE (France), and CASBEE (Japan). The “Manual” also draws from China’s “National Comfortable Housing Demonstration Project Construction Technical Key Points,” “Residential Performance Evaluation Technical Standards,” and other related content compiled on the basis of site selection and residential, energy, and indoor environments. The assessment methods of five sub-items, including environmental quality, residential water environment, materials, and resources, are divided into three types: single assessment, stage assessment, and project assessment [5].

The “Manual” can meet the needs of China’s green community construction to a certain extent. In fact, representative construction cases have been formed in Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, and other places. On this basis, various places are exploring the practice of green communities. China has also devised corresponding assessment indicators and implementation rules suitable for the local area. However, the following areas lacking in the evaluation system need to be improved: commercial and economic indicators; public participation indicators; attention to the economy, society, and residents’ living habits in the community; public participation in community construction and management; and simple accumulation. The scoring method fails to highlight the weights of the three indicator levels involved in the “Manual”; most indicators at all levels are biased toward principled indicators, lacking specific quantitative provisions. Thus, differences in the manual indicators during the specific implementation stage are inevitable, and inadequate understanding causes deviations.

The root of the problem is the lack of originality of the “Manual.” From the first to the fifth editions, it tends to combine the evaluation system elements of the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other countries, while neglecting them to fully reflect the latecomer advantage. Moreover, it criticizes different evaluation systems from theoretical basis to index selection, weight design, and practical effects. The theoretical basis of the existing evaluation system in the world is mostly sustainable development theory, circular economy theory, and new urbanism theory, among others. Moreover, it focuses on optimizing the spatial layout of traditional capitalist communities from a technical or scientific perspective and eases the need for construction, community, and planning. The social contradictions, such as spatial injustice, brought about problems. The “Manual” also realizes capitalism’s improvement and development. Various evaluation systems based on the theory of existing evaluation systems are bound to have certain standpoint and value care limitations. The construction of socialist green communities in contemporary China will adhere to the fundamental Marxist standpoints, methods, and viewpoints based on learning from outside experiences. Moreover, it will build a comprehensive and self-consistent evaluation system based on national conditions.

Criticism of Spatial Justice of the Existing Evaluation System

Different types of evaluation index systems are formed under the guidance of certain theoretical logic, which is the abstraction and measurement of objective facts by subjective theoretical logic. The healthy and orderly development of green communities is bound to be inseparable from the existence of a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation index system. Moreover, a scientific theory is the prerequisite basis for its generation. The theoretical bases of the green community evaluation index system in UK and the US are mainly green environmentalism, sustainable development theory, circular economy theory, etc., which mainly focuses on the decarbonization and greening of the physical space of the buildings and settlements, and simplifies the community into a physical living space, which ignores the other attributes of the community as a social production space, and also limits the evaluation of the green community to the interior of a certain community system, without integrating the community into the vision of the whole urban ecosystem. From the perspective of development, a unidimensional evaluation system appears in the initial stage of the emergence of something. However, as things develop, its limitations become increasingly prominent, and a new system will emerge. The traditional evaluation system has opened a precedent for the green construction of community space to a certain extent. However, little attention is paid to other dimensions of community space and the relationship between the community and the overall urban ecological system; hence, it is not conducive to creating community space for a better life.

As some scholars have pointed out, with the rapid development of urbanization, the process of urban spatial production and resource distribution in China contains the risk of spatial injustice. [7] Spatial justice as the value tendency of green community building. The Marxian theory of spatial justice takes the care of spatial subjects and their social practices as a basic guideline. Living space, as a place of human existence and an object of transformation, is not only a microcosmic field for people to enjoy spatial rights and interests and exercise spatial rights, but also a basic unit of spatial production and spatial use. In the pursuit of spatial justice of spatial governance, some scholars have proposed that resources of social value, such as public facilities, transportation, medical care, education and ecology, should be allocated reasonably and fairly in urban space. [8] Some scholars have also looked at the micro-right to the city as a humanistic consideration of spatial justice. [9] The theory of spatial justice, guided by historical materialism, is a spatialization of social justice, viewing space as a “physical-spiritual-social” synthesis, which is similar to the idea of ecological civilization, which pursues the harmonious symbiosis of “human- nature-society”. Therefore, using it as the theoretical basis for the evaluation index system of green communities in contemporary China is more appropriate.

(1) Era of spatial justice

Since the 20^th century, the neo-Marxists, represented by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, have created the “urban Marxism” trend of thought that understands the city as the overall composition of human society and has promoted historical materialism as an important theoretical paradigm for analyzing modern cities. [10] Urban Marxism believes that historical materialist urban research should not only be limited to understanding cities through the division of labor and production methods but should also construct a physically, spiritually, and socially unified urban concept, examining the cities in the context of the social totality that is constituted by human productive activities. In the social totality constituted by activities, the city is the organic body of society, and space production itself is a part of social development. Social development is analyzed through the overall urban concept. [11] The core of urban Marxism lies in reconstructing historical materialism, which should have spatial connotations. Moreover, the dialectical opening of “the basic form of all existence is space and time” in “Anti-Duhring” is the urban issue – urban space is not only a geographical space with physical and natural attributes but also a social and historical space as it is the sum of physics, spirit (culture), and society. The social and historical urban space has naturally entered the spatial of Marxist justice, giving birth to Marxist urban space justice (referred to as spatial justice). It originates from Marx and Engels’ judgments on the spatial division, differentiation, and opposition of space resulting from space materialization, space capitalization, space politicization, and space power in a capitalist space production. The goal of free and comprehensive development is to respect and protect people’s spatial rights and interests and to realize the fair distribution of spatial resources, the rational and orderly production of space, and the efficient governance of spatial affairs. In the report of the 20^th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Xi Jinping emphasized that by 2035, a happier and better life for the people is one of the general goals of China’s development. [12] Some scholars in China believe that spatial justice requires the exertion of the wisdom and quality of the main body of spatial production, so that the spirit of spatial ethics can be transformed into a realistic moral existence and promote the harmony of ethical life in social space. [13] The subject of spatial justice is human, emphasizing humans’ responsibility for both the ecosystem and civilized society. The fair spatial relationships between humans, humans and society, and humans and nature must be established.

(2) The necessity of green community evaluation guided by spatial justice

From the perspective of historical materialism, the green community is, in its essence, a kind of overall space oriented toward ecologicalization. The realization of the most extensive spatial justice has become the meaning of creating the green community. At the academic level, the three-dimensional spatial justice of “physics-spirituality-society” is consistent with the concept of green community in the era of ecological civilization. The green community derived from the concept of socialist ecological civilization is a community of life that realizes the harmonious coexistence and co-prosperity of humans, society, and nature. The integration of an ecological civilization system and ecological value and cultural concepts is a collection of “ecological people” integrating “green thinking-green action-green personality”, [14] a new governance system shared by the party, government, enterprises, and society. It is the micro-foundation and concrete existence of socialist ecological civilization and modern state governance. Therefore, the construction of the green community rating system in contemporary China should not be limited to the ecological landscape level or the circular economy level. Moreover, the multidimensional view of spatial justice should be used as its theoretical basis and logical framework. At the practical level, the multidimensional spatial justice concept is consistent with the “Green Community Creation Action Plan” recently promulgated by the party and the state. In July 2020, the following six departments were deployed under the “Overall Plan of Action for the Creation of Green Living”: the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and the State Administration for Market Supervision and Administration. The “Green Community Creation Action Plan” was jointly issued. The overall action plan focuses on the creation of a green community in contemporary China in six aspects, including the construction and improvement mechanism of the community’s living environment, greening of community infrastructure, livable environment for the community, community information intelligentization, and the green culture of the community (Table 3). This scheme is consistent with the basic principles of spatial justice at the macro-level, transcending the traditional single-dimensional cognition of green communities and focusing on standardizing the construction of green communities from the perspective of overall space. In summary, taking spatial justice as the theoretical basis for the construction of green communities in contemporary China is supported by academic theory and confirmed by practice.

China is launching the creation of green communities and simultaneously a community evaluation system reflecting the requirements of spatial justice. The healthy community evaluation system, originated from the World Health Organization’s initiative in the 1980s, has also emerged in China. It is the “cell engineering” of the healthy city movement, which mainly covers public health and ecological environment protection, planning and construction, and social management. On March 21, 2020, the first healthy community evaluation standard, “Healthy Community Evaluation Standard,” jointly compiled by the China Academy of Building Research, the China Urban Science Research Association, and other units, was released. The standards mainly include air, water, comfort (e.g., sound, six types of indicators including light and heat), fitness, humanities (e.g., communication, psychology, and fitness for the old and young), and services (management, food, activities, and publicity). [15] The proposed healthy community standards also include 10 concepts, including light, sports, thermal comfort, acoustic environment, materials, mental, community, and innovation (after the reference list). The healthy community evaluation system is consistent with the principles of spatial justice. It integrates ecological resources, human elements, and governance elements and has a certain reference value for constructing the green community evaluation index system in contemporary China.

Evaluation Index System for Green Communities in Contemporary China Oriented by Spatial Justice

As aforementioned, the spatial justice derived from historical materialism has a strong guiding value in creating green communities. It is an extremely “qualified” theoretical paradigm from both the academic and practical levels. Constructing a green community evaluation index system that conforms to spatial justice can effectively overcome the injustice of the community space caused by the traditional evaluation index system. It also leads to the construction of green communities scientifically, reasonably, and comprehensively. Thus, it is can better protect the green space rights of the people.

(1) Determining the framework of the green community evaluation index system

In the past, some scholars regarded the three dimensions of spatial thinking of ecological and ecological cycle development, spatial connection between people, community awareness and community planning as the basic principles of community evaluation, [16] but there is a lack of a scientific and clear theoretical support. Starting from the three-dimensional spatial justice theory of “physics-spirituality-society,” the contemporary Chinese green community evaluation index system (hereinafter referred to as the “new system”) will systematically surpass the existing evaluation index system based on ideology and indicator elements. It will detail not only the theoretical cornerstones and analytical framework of the evaluation index system but also the operable measurement indexes, thereby realizing the organic unity of “evaluation target-evaluation concept-evaluation index” (Fig. 1).

Physical evaluation has always been the main or even the entire content of green community evaluation. The ecological landscape is the material basis and external manifestation of spatial justice, whereas spatial justice is the value care and ethical dimension of ecological landscape construction in green communities. Spatial justice without a good ecological landscape is an impossible goal, and ecological landscapes that do not pursue spatial justice are destined to become a “royal garden” belonging to only a few people. The evaluation indicators of the new system at the physical level mainly include two levels: green buildings and green transportation. Green buildings not only include the basic requirements of ecological civilization in the site selection, design, construction, and use of buildings in the community but also posits that the community, as a component of the entire regional ecosystem, must comply with the laws of ecological development and environmental governance of the entire region. Moreover, unjust situations in practice, such as some communities wanting only to encroach upon the ecological spatial resources of surrounding communities to achieve greening and other unjust situations, must be avoided. Green transportation is an evaluation index oriented toward modern urban issues, such as traffic congestion, and it has always been the focus of the traditional evaluation index system. If a green community is the terminal of a green city, green transportation is the vascular organization that connects the entire city. Some scholars make evaluation constraints on the environmental construction of green transportation from four aspects: diversity, accessibility, comfort and safety. [17] Green transportation is based more on overall urban greening, and it proposes clear demands on the construction of green communities.

The evaluation of the humanistic spirit appeared late in the evaluation of green communities and received little attention. This resulted from the short history of the development of green communities and is directly related to the lack of scientific systems in the development of green communities. The development of green communities in the West underwent roughly three stages: the garden community focusing on hardware construction from the end of the 19^th century to the 1970s, the sustainable community emphasizing the construction of soft environments from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21^st century, and the current era of big data and smart, low-carbon community. The construction of green communities in the West focuses on the low-carbon design of buildings, space greening, energy saving, emission reduction, and environmental participation. Although culture and public participation are valued in later development, the evaluation system mainly focuses on hardware facilities. Greening is a green community concept that focuses on the environmental landscape. The cultivation and practice of ecological culture is an important dimension of spatial justice and a major difference from the traditional evaluation system. As the space carrier of green production and lifestyles, the green community has an important function in realizing social and cultural innovation and the ecological shift of people’s way of thinking. The current cultural construction of green communities focuses on two aspects. The first is to build a three-dimensional and multidimensional ecological culture education system, which can improve people’s awareness of ecological protection and behavior and create a good social atmosphere. The second is to pay attention toward protecting the historical and cultural resources in the community. Moreover, the community construction plan should fully respect the regional cultural characteristics. This is also to avoid the “one-thousand-one side” and “existence without interior” in the construction of green communities in mainly countries.[18] Building a diversified, heterogeneous, and distinctive environment under the comprehensive consideration of local culture and location is a must – a green community with Chinese characteristics.

A green community evaluation incorporates the dimensions or elements of social governance, which is determined by the overall social living space of the community. Especially in the 20^th century, a new public management movement with “social autonomy” as the core emerged in Western countries, and social governance factors started appearing in the community evaluation index system. Spatial justice is an idea closely related to social justice. It is “a term of power relations involving the distribution of resources, rights, and material space”. [19] Some scholars have summarized the principles for the development of NGOs at the level of green community governance in China from the experience of Canada’s green community entrepreneurship on green community governance participation. [20] There are also scholars who propose to promote the level of informatization of green communities with the help of infrastructure and building facilities, information infrastructure, smart platforms and databases, smart special application systems and related guarantee system construction.[21] Therefore, a key point of the green community evaluation system based on spatial justice is to base itself on modern national governance and improve the community’s green governance capabilities and governance system. However, the community governance evaluation in the existing evaluation system focuses on public participation in community site selection and design models (Table 3). Such an evaluation of the social governance of green communities is relatively limited and not sufficiently comprehensive. Marx’s practical materialism posits that people’s social life practice acts on the environment and accepts environmental constraints while people transform themselves and their social relationships, thereby transforming the environment. Green community construction under the statute of spatial justice must optimize the microenvironment of the living space and construct the consensus of the spatial subjects from the aspect of the material basis of social spatial production and resource allocation, so as to do a good job of the social system project of spatial construction in the organic combination of material and spiritual civilization. [22] Therefore, the evaluation of social governance that must be a concern in the evaluation of green communities in contemporary China will no longer only be the “appearance” of social elements but must also be designed and measured from the perspective of realizing spatial justice. Then, in practice, the public’s rights and interests in space effectively guarantee and promote the emergence of a harmonious symbiosis pattern of “man-nature-society.”

Fig. 1.

Green community evaluation system structure based on spatial justice.

(2) Selecting an evaluation index system based on analytic hierarchy process

The program indicators denote simple differentiation under the criteria indicators. They are also universal indicators that could be covered, considering the actual construction of China’s green communities and different geographic regions. The setting of the observation indicators under each project indicator updates and supplements the original evaluation basis. In addition to the actual evaluation of the green community construction, the observation indicators lead to the future development direction. In contrast to the “China Green and Low-Carbon Residential Technical Assessment Manual” (Fifth Edition), which focuses on indoor environmental quality and residential water environment, the setting of this indicator system will make residents’ lifestyles green and yield low-carbon energy consumption. Energy conservation is the focus. On the one hand, the evaluation basis for residential area selection and the surrounding environment in the original index system has been relatively comprehensive. On the other, residents’ requirements for constructing green communities have shifted from the construction of material foundations to the transformation of lifestyles and the cultivation of green behavior. Based on the reality of China’s green communities and the actual demands of residents, the standards in Table 4 are drawn.

Determining the Index Weight of the Evaluation System

In this study, the author invited 10 relevant experts and scholars in domestic ecology, environmental economics, environmental ethics, urban planning, among others, to subjectively empower the criteria and indicators of the evaluation system and obtain the evaluation indicators for green community construction through normalization. The weights of criteria indicators in the system are presented in Table 5, and the scales are presented in Table 6. Simultaneously, the experts and scholars underscored the relative importance of the four sets of program indicators according to Table 7 and obtained four judgment matrices for these sets. This study adds 10 to the judgment matrix obtained by the experts and scholars and then divides it by 10. The judgment matrix used to calculate the weight of the project indicators is obtained, and the four groups of indicators are tested for consistency.

Taking the first group of principal indicators of green management as an example, the author recorded the judgment matrix of its plan index as A.

The maximum eigenvalue of A is 4.1049 and the unitization of the corresponding feature vector is (1.9666, 1.0481, 0.7470, and 0.3763), The values are then multiplied by the weight 0.3788 to obtain the weight of the project indicator to which green management belongs (Table 7).

Next, the author checks the consistency of the judgment matrix, the purpose of which is to find whether contradictions exist in the judgment matrices of different indicators. Finally, whether the judgment matrix passes the consistency test according to its consistency ratio CR is determined. If the consistency of the judgment matrix CR is given by CR=CIRI<0.1, the judgment matrix is valid; if CR=CIRI>0.1, the judgment matrix test fails until satisfactory consistency is obtained. Among them, the calculation formula of the consistency index CI is CI=λmax−nn−1, with λ_max being the maximum characteristic root of the judgment matrix. RI (Random Index) is called the average random consistency index, it is only related to the matrix order n. Compare the order of the matrix with the existing table (Table 8). Therefore, the consistency ratio of the green management judgment matrix is 0.04 (less than 0.1), which is valid. Likewise, the weights of the project indicators of green building, green transportation, and green culture can be calculated (Table 9); the consistency ratios of their judgment matrices are all less than 0.1, indicating consistency of the results.

Determining the Evaluation Index Results

Therefore, the evaluation results of the green community construction set in the previous article are judged according to the comprehensive score of the percentile system. When evaluating green community construction, the experts’ scores are calculated according to different weights (Table 10), and then, the weights after conversion are calculated. The scores are summarized in Table 10.

According to the suggestions of experts and scholars, the final score of green community construction is set to 100 points. Moreover, community evaluation is divided into two categories: green communities and non-green communities according to the scores. The green communities are further divided into four grades according to the score level (Table 11).