A SP survey-based method for evaluating environmental performance of urban commercial districts: A case study in Beijing

Environmental assessment plays an important role in directing urban development towards a sustainable way. Unfortunately the majority of currently available environmental assessment tools emphasize either the regional scale or single-building scale, while giving less attention to the meso-scale. This paper presents a methodology of meso-scale environmental performance assessment for urban commercial districts. It extends both the environmental performance assessment and the environmental efficiency assessment by integrating the indicators from three aspects, i.e. the environmental quality, the social and economic value, and the environmental load. Consumer satisfaction is also incorporated. The Stated Preference survey (SP survey) was introduced for the evaluation to get the preference of the consumers, and weights of the indicators were decided via discrete choice model fitting. Six typical commercial districts of Beijing were sampled to test the viability. The results of our research are proved helpful for understanding the environmental situation of urban commercial districts therefore instructive for city planning and management. The proposed method can also be applied to other meso-scale districts such as industrial districts and residential districts in city.