To rehabilitate or redevelop? A study of the decision criteria for urban regeneration projects

Purpose – To develop a multi‐criteria decision‐making framework for evaluating different schemes of urban regeneration project. Design/methodology/approach – Urban decay in Hong Kong has long warranted community concern. To tackle the problem, there are generally two different approaches, namely building rehabilitation and redevelopment. In the past, urban regeneration was dominated by complete redevelopment. However, with the rise of the concept of sustainability, the choice of building rehabilitation is becoming increasingly popular. Nevertheless, with either option, difficulties are often encountered in balancing the diverse interests of the stakeholders, who have varied aims and ambitions for the achievements of a project. Therefore, we have developed a framework, which contains the factors to be considered when planning an urban renewal project. To obtain the relative importance of these factors in a reliable but reasonably inexpensive manner from the building‐related professionals, the Non‐structural Fuzzy Decision Support System was employed. In total, 34 building surveyors and 31 town planners were interviewed using structured questionnaires. Findings – The set of perceived weightings of the decision criteria obtained from building surveyors was quite different from that from town planners. People of different backgrounds hold divergent views towards the relative importance of the decision criteria in an urban regeneration project. Research limitations/implications – Due to the resource limitations, individuals from the professions of building surveying and town planning were studied only. Practical implications – To achieve a credible decision‐making process, it is therefore advisable to have a balanced mix of members in any urban regeneration project decision making panel. Also, the framework developed in this study can be used to facilitate the decision making process in the future project. Originality/value – This paper is the first attempt to explore the relative importance of various criteria for the decision‐making process in urban regeneration projects perceived by different professionals.