Weightings of decision-making criteria for neighbourhood renewal: Perspectives of university students in Hong Kong

Urban decay has long been of great concern to society in Hong Kong. Different approaches have been promoted by public agents to curb the problem, including building rehabilitation and redevelopment. Difficulties are often encountered, however, in balancing the diverse interests of stakeholders in deciding on the way forward for a project. While multicriteria decision-making models can be employed to facilitate the evaluation of available options, whether the process is sensitive to the project characteristics, such as scale and locality, has not been addressed. Through a structured questionnaire survey with 124 university students, it was found that that, from the perspective of young people, the rankings of decision criteria in terms of relative importance were very similar in Sai Yee Street and Kwun Tong Town Centre Projects. Yet the magnitudes of perceived weightings for most criteria varied significantly across the projects. These findings imply that projects with different characteristics should warrant different sets of criteria weightings to fit the specific constraints and circumstances in the projects. Practical implications for public administrators in formulating neighbourhood renewal strategy are described.