In response to excessive energy consumption and severe pollution, green building has gained increasing attention around the world. Governments’ top-down incentive schemes and consumers’ bottom-up choice preferences are two major channels of residential green building promotion. Regarding the bottom-up route, high liveability performance is critical to ensuring that occupants are willing to make secondary purchases or provide recommendations. Therefore, this paper, using post-occupancy evaluation, aims to evaluate and compare the liveability performance of green and conventional buildings from the perspectives of occupants. The results verified that the eco-label effect (i.e., subjective differences for building types) influenced the occupants’ evaluations of building performance. When controlling for eco-label bias, we found that green buildings were not superior to conventional buildings in terms of liveability. This is highly relevant to evaluations of the orientation of green building certifications that concentrate on the consumption of energy and material resources but neglect the living experience of occupants. In addition, indicators related to thermal comfort (e.g., indoor temperature or frequency of air conditioner use) played an important role in the occupants’ liveability evaluations. These findings provide concrete guidance regarding how the evaluation systems of green building certifications in various countries should be upgraded in the near future.

@en

The ageing population tends to be seen as a burden of cities’ future development. Thus, the public funds for older residents’ wellbeing are at risk of being cut back under the economic austerity due to the prevalent neoliberalism policy atmosphere. However, some cities set good examples to turn their older citizens into active contributors to sustainable urban development (SUD) by developing age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC). Taking Hong Kong as an example, this study aims to raise a strategy for policymakers, especially at the municipal level, to incorporate the concept of AFCC in SUD. Data were retrieved for our analysis from a published report of the Hong Kong Public Policy Research Fund project. A total of 15 AFCC and SUD policy factors were identified by using factor analysis. The correlations between these policy factors were evaluated and visualised in a synergetic effect network. According to the network, this study indicates that developing the silver hair market can be a suitable entry point to realise SUD by adopting an AFCC development. Isolation prevention, social sustainability and low-energy-consumption development are the supportive policy factors for the silver hair market. Specifically, respect, discrimination prevention, communication and information, age-friendly facilities, environmental safety and public transportation accessibility are five AFCC policy factors incorporated in the policy integration to enhance older residents’ wellbeing further. This study is an innovative attempt to develop a comprehensive model for the synergy between sustainable urban development and an age-friendly city and community using a correlation network. This study also provides a reference for other city governments to respond to population ageing positively.@en