A resident-oriented approach to developing sustainable welfare housing community: a case study of Guangzhou, China

Welfare housing tenants in project-based welfare housing communities usually have very limited choice in terms of the spatial and locational characteristics of their neighborhood. However, to make city more integrated and socially-amiable, welfare housing developers and administrators should also take residents’ consideration into account when developing and maintaining such welfare housing communities. In this paper, the relative importance of different spatial, locational and environmental variables from these welfare residents’ perspective will be examined in some public housing projects in Guangzhou, China. In doing so, this paper proposes a resident-oriented development model for making a more sustainable and amiable welfare housing community. Based on an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) framework, we find that among all the elements in neighborhood, accessible medical care is of prime importance, followed by housing quality and sense of security. According to the analysis, this paper concludes that a successful and sustainable welfare housing community goes beyond the need of merely providing accommodation. A well-designed neighborhood is needed for residents to sustain their livelihood there, especially when most of the welfare housing communities are built in the relatively remote part of the city for cheap land cost.