| The importance of urban renewal in improving the physical environment conditions and the living standards of the public is widely recognized in Hong Kong. However, many previous studies revealed that a lot of urban renewal projects failed to tackle the problems of urban decay and to satisfy affected parties, and brought the dilemmas and conflicts among the three domains: economy, environment and society.;To address the deficiencies of current practices and improve the quality of the renewal projects, this study is initiated to define what constitutes a sustainable urban renewal project and how to implement it. The objectives of this research are to develop a sustainable approach in planning urban renewal projects to be conducted in Hong Kong by means of urban design; to identify the relationship between urban design considerations and the sustainable development objectives; to determine the underlying factors that contribute to sustainable urban regeneration and to derive a model for assessing the sustainability level of local urban renewal projects.;It is expected that this research can strengthen the understanding of local developers, urban designers and government officials on how to plan a sustainable urban renewal project to create a sustainable community afterwards. They should take into account of those crucial factors extracted in this study in order to attain excellent performance in local projects to be carried out in the future. Furthermore, the assessment model suggested here can ascertain the quality of local urban renewal projects as the impacts of the projects on economy, environment and society can be predicted in advance and necessary adjustment to the renewal proposals can also be made beforehand.;Apart from its practical applications, this research is also useful in academia. Although there is abundant research studying the concept of sustainability and the value of urban design respectively, there are few attempts to combine them into urban redevelopment literature. There are a number of schemes and indicators available for assessing sustainable development, but they are not tailor-made for measuring the performance of urban renewal projects. Therefore, the findings of this research can enrich the contents of related topics. |
