With the rapid speed of urbanization globally, both housing demand and pressure in expanding urban areas of economic activities are increasing. Shortage of housing, especially social housing in urbanized areas, is getting more and more acute since more people are being drawn to urban areas for better job opportunities. Governments around the world, including China, have established various social housing policies that involve the construction of public housing to meet the needs of low-income people living within cities who are essential for the urban economy. Public housing policy in China was first proposed in the Circular of the State Council on Further Deepening the Urban Housing System Reform in 1994. Since 2006, China has accelerated the construction of public housing in urban cities. During the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011–2015), the government set a target of building 36 million public housing units, roughly double the number planned in the previous decade. At the same time, the government has improved the housing provision system, including the renovation of rundown areas and provision of more public rental housing etc.
However, if insufficient consideration was given to the design stage to public housing development, a lot of problems could arise later on in the operational stage. For instance, existing research on public housing in New York City pointed out that public housing is usually built in areas with poor economic conditions, which increases the residents’ sense of isolation [
1]. Some researchers pointed out common problems in public housing such as insufficient communal areas and living space for low-income families when comparing with private housing in Hong Kong [
2]. In addition, other problems such as poor indoor air quality, poor thermal comfort, negative impact on residents’ health from environmental problems, lack of privacy, home–work separation, poor housing quality were found to be common in cities around the world [
3,
4,
5]. Therefore, in order to improve the residents’ quality of life (QoL) in public housing, public housing policy with respect to design elements must be improved upon.
As one of the first cities where public housing was built in China, Guangzhou has a relatively long history of social housing policy development. Compared with other cities in China, Guangzhou has a lower coverage rate of public housing. Urban villages with poor living conditions are still a favorable choice for middle and low-income people due to the low and hence affordable rental level [
6]. The contradiction between the supply and demand in the housing markets is even more obvious in this first-tier city. In the current period of urban development in China, the developmental goal has changed from the original scale expansion policy to the improvement on housing quality, urban culture, residents’ QoL and scientific decision-making in urban governance [
7]. Similarly, in addition to ensuring the quantities of public housing communities to be developed, other factors such as the quality of construction, residential environment in public housing, systematic management of public housing projects, scientific decision-making, financing efficiency, and post-occupancy evaluation should be given equal amount of attention. Research and evaluation of the public housing community situations help to understand the main problems of the current residential environment, which is needed for improving the construction quality and providing theoretical support for public housing policy improvement. Hence, this paper aims at providing suggestions for a more complete set of design parameters for public housing communities to satisfy residents’ demand.
In summary, this paper raises a major research question pertaining to the development of welfare housing, namely, the correlation between QoL and the housing environment for welfare tenants. This is an important aspect as residents living in welfare housing community by definition did not really make a location choice to live there. This is different from tenants or owners living in the private sector housing community where they select the best living environment that they can afford, with an objective of enhancing their QoL. From a public policy point of view, just because the welfare housing rental or price level is low does not and should not mean that the environmental quality should also be low. An empirical and scientific examination of how the residents in these welfare housing communities evaluate their living environment with respect to the optimal human settlement policy therefore will contribute to the general literature on housing policy debate. This paper takes Guangzhou as a case study and applies an empirical analytical framework to examine how residents in welfare housing communities evaluate the human settlement environment around them that would contribute to their QoL in living there.
Following the primary aim of this research, objectives of this study include understanding of the residential satisfaction and requirements of the residents in welfare housing; exploring the influencing factors of the residential environment in public housing communities; putting forward suggestions for the improvement of the living environment so as to provide a basis for enhancing residents’ QoL in the public housing community. To be specific, this study focuses on the following sub-questions:
Literature Review
The sciences of Human Settlements first originated from the Greek architect, C.A.Doxiadis, and his Ekistics theory. A settlement refers to a community for people to live in. The human settlement environment consists of five dimensions: nature, human, society, residence, and supporting networks. These are reflected in various aspects including economy, society, politics, science and technology, and culture [
8]. The concept of “Sciences of Human Settlements” in China was first proposed in 1993 by Wu Liangyong. His research framework composed of five systems and five research hierarchies which are shown in
Figure 1 below [
9]. It indicates different perspectives and scopes of human settlement analysis.
Among the five systems, the natural system and the human system are the two basic systems that constitute the main body of human settlement environment, while the residential, social, and supportive systems are the basic conditions to meet the requirements of human settlement. A good residential environment does not only need to be oriented to ‘biological man’ to meet the requirements of ecological environment, it also needs to be oriented to ‘social man’ to meet the requirements of cultural environment. Similarly, when providing public housing, the government should not ignore the feelings of ‘social man’ because of the low rental income, nor should the government view the provision of public housing as shelter only. Both private and public housing should meet the basic human needs for residential environment, including housing needs, community needs and social needs. Therefore, in this study, residential satisfaction with their settlement environment also includes their satisfaction with the indoor housing environment, community environment and social relations.
There are different evaluation criteria for different levels of human settlements. The evaluation of human settlement environment at the regional level involves comparison among cities, which is of great significance in realizing comprehensive and coordinated development of the region. Scholars, for instance, have evaluated the sustainability of human settlement environments within the Zhejiang province from the perspective of the ecological environment, economic development and public service convenience aspects [
10]. Their study combined the physical environment with the residents’ subjective experience and provided a new research perspective on human settlement environments. Other researchers on the other hand studied the living environment of 11 cities in the Jiangxi province, taking the harmony between human and nature, the living environment and the social-economic environment as evaluation dimensions [
11]. They concluded that the level of harmony in the housing community was the most important aspect, which was followed by the social-economic conditions, and then the living conditions.
On the other hand, research on the community level provides a more precise and detailed analysis on the construction of our urban and regional living environments. Existing research literature on the residential environments on the community level mostly focuses on two aspects—objective living conditions and the residents’ subjective feelings and levels of satisfaction towards the environment. Taking a residential community in Dalian, Liaoning Province as an example, scholars concluded that a resident’s background was the most important aspect in influencing the assessment of satisfaction towards the community environment, which is then followed by services available in the community [
12]. Interestingly, the natural environment was the least influential aspect. On the other hand, some researchers took the transient population in the community as the research object and evaluated that the human settlement environment satisfaction may differ in this segment of relatively low-income residents. Their study found that transportation network was the most important factor affecting the residents’ satisfaction, followed by the community environment, while the influence of neighborhood relationships and indoor environments were similar [
13].
Measuring residents’ satisfaction in the housing community is important not just as a measure to assess the success of housing policy, but also significant in contributing to residents’ public health and happiness, which correspond to basic human needs [
14]. This is even more important for residents with special needs such as psychological disabilities [
15]. Residential satisfaction refers to the gap between the residents’ psychological expectations and actual perception of the living environment. It is an important factor in measuring the residents’ QoL. Residents’ satisfaction can stem from personal reaction towards the physical environment, but it can also be contributed by the sentiment among the residents that they could influence the outcome of urban transformation in their community with their participation in the process [
16]. This sense of control contributes a lot to the social impact of a well-designed housing community, especially a welfare housing community. In this way, it was also noted that psychological perception of the optimal environment among residents was also important, especially the residents’ perception of what could have been done from design stage and what could be changed in the future. It has been shown that residents who can change a suboptimal housing situation show higher appreciation of their environment because they have a better situation to look forward to [
17].
Research in Hong Kong found that the housing environment was the most important factor affecting the overall QoL of low-income groups. After comparing the residential environment and needs of different income groups, the study found that, compared with the middle-income groups, the low-income groups had greater demand for better housing location in order to minimize commuting costs [
4]. Therefore, the low-income characteristics of the general public housing residents should be considered and such characteristics and needs of residents should be combined in the establishment of the evaluation model for the residential satisfaction of welfare housing living environment.
In measuring residents’ satisfaction, there are different approaches. Some studies created an evaluation index system based on housing quality variables such as temperature and humidity, and evaluated residents’ comfort and satisfaction [
18]. Others focused on external public facilities and communal spaces of the public housing community, indoor housing environment, public facilities, and overall neighborhood environment [
5,
19,
20,
21,
22]. In addition, factors such as property management service in the community [
23,
24] and neighborhood relationships have also been considered as important variables in the construction of these evaluation indices in measuring residential satisfaction in the public housing community [
25,
26]. Notably, it has also been found that such factors as accessibility to various function areas in the housing community, environmental features of the housing structure, satisfaction in various facilities in the inhabited environment, environmental security, neighbor relationships, and the external appearance of the housing environment all contributed to residents’ satisfaction significantly [
14,
27,
28]. Apart from these tangible community services, some intangible variables pertaining to the design scheme are also important. For instance, Aigbavboa and Wellington researched the neighborhood environment of public housing and found that privacy was the most important factor affecting residents’ satisfaction with the neighborhood environment [
29]. On the other hand, sense of privacy and safety does not mean exclusiveness as a good mix of both private sector and welfare residents within the same community area can also produce a harmonious environment for the residents altogether, among other variables [
30]. These are all important attributes to human settlement. Hence, both the physical state of the housing units, including interior condition, physical setting of the environment, as well as the social environment, including the sense of community, sense of trust among residents and residents’ autonomy within the community, have been empirically found to be significant [
31,
32]. Based on these studies, an ideal evaluation system should have a comprehensive consideration of these dimensions such as the indoor housing environment, the outdoor community environment, the residents’ psychology, public facilities, policies, family financial situations, operation management, site selection, etc.
There have only been a few studies that investigated the evaluation of the public housing communities based on the sciences of human settlements. Some researchers evaluated the human settlement environment and the willingness of the residents to live in public housing communities in Xi‘an, China and established an evaluation system from four dimensions: public facilities, housing conditions, the ecological environment, and the social/humanistic environment [
33]. Others evaluated the human settlement environment of low-income residential housing and communities in Guangzhou from the perspective of the built environment and the residents’ subjective satisfaction and proposed improvement strategies accordingly [
34]. In this respect, there is still space for research on the public community environmental assessment, especially from the perspective of Human Settlement Science. To fill this gap, this paper builds an evaluation model based on the five systems that are included in the Sciences of Human Settlements theory, namely: nature, human, society, residence, and a supporting network, with respect to the environmental characteristics of Guangzhou.