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China faces a challenge to balance its future urbanization process with resource conservation and environmental protection. Promoting sustainable construction is identified by the Chinese government as an important strategy to tackle such challenges. To promote sustainable construction, the Chinese government has released a large number of laws, policies and regulations. This paper investigates the policy system in China which aims to facilitate the transition to sustainable construction. The related laws, policies and regulations are analyzed and three main functions are identified, namely regulation and control, economic incentives and supporting activities. The results show that the behaviours of various participants in the construction industry, including the government, developers, builders, suppliers, and designers, are regulated and controlled by these laws and regulations. Subsidy policies, award policies and economic innovation policies are adopted by the government to promote renewable energy applications in buildings and infrastructure construction. The key supporting activities for sustainable construction include strengthening technology innovation, improving standards and evaluation, establishing demonstration projects, and publicity. Two emerging challenges of the current policy system are also identified. They are: a lack of considering social and economic dimensions of sustainable construction, and the ineffectiveness of some key policies such as the environmental impact assessment policy. This paper provides a useful reference for construction corporations and policy makers in China to facilitate sustainable construction in future urbanization process. Similarly, policy makers in other emerging economies can understand how sustainable construction is promoted in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable construction projects affect various stakeholders with different social, environmental and economic interests. It is essential that the decision makers maintain effective communication with relevant groups to avoid project failures. Although citizen participation offers a means of better addressing and meeting stakeholder concerns and expectations, the decision/evaluations of contemporary sustainable projects are becoming ever more complicated, with an increasing number of stakeholders involved to actively defend their own interests. In response, this paper provides a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the stakeholders of sustainable construction in China and quantifies their influence in decision/evaluations by semi-structured interviews (in research stage I) and a three-round Delphi survey (in research stage II). Follow-up interviews (in research stage III) are carried out to collect more in-depth views concerning the characteristics and the respective importance of each stakeholder group involved. The findings indicate that the government is the most influential entity and the extent to which its intervention is needed in balancing the interests of other stakeholders presents a major challenge. The high potential influence of end-users is also identified, suggesting the need for a more transparent and inclusive participatory decision/evaluation process in the country. An enhanced future role for NGOs is further identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction industries have significant impacts on the economy, society and environment. To transform construction industry towards sustainability, construction enterprises' perceptions and performance on sustainability needs to be understood and evaluated, which has not be fully explored by existing studies. This paper holistically examines the Chinese construction enterprises’ attitude towards and performance on various aspects of sustainability (e.g. the economic, social and environmental aspects) in order to identify those aspects the firms perceive to be the most and least important and those aspects the firms perform best and worst on. The associations among the sustainability attitude, sustainability performance, and firm size are also explored. The findings show that quality management and customer service are perceived as the most important as well as the best-performed aspects by the firms while supporting community development is the least important and worst-performed aspect. Sustainability attitude is positively correlated with performance, and larger firms tend to have better sustainability performance than that of small ones. However, larger construction firms do not necessarily perceive sustainability more important. This study provides a useful reference for policy makers and researchers to understand how sustainability is perceived and implemented by the Chinese construction firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to creating value and jobs, the construction industry uses a considerable amount of resources with severe consequences for the environment. Therefore, its implications should be reduced, especially since this industry has opportunity to reduce economic, environmental and social impacts. Once mitigating impacts is such an important matter for the construction industry, a systematic review of the literature has been run in order to investigate studies on the quantitative methodologies of sustainability in construction. This paper presents a review of over 2,600 papers on the topic. Mixed methods were applied for bibliometry, with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis methodology to conduct a quantitative bibliometric search and subsequently assess the articles included using qualitative methods. These studies were subdivided into three groups: sustainability in construction, environmental aspects, and others. VOSviewer software was used in the quantitative analysis of documents, institutions and the most referenced journals. The results demonstrated that the first articles related to the topic of sustainability in construction were published in 1993 and that among the studies found in Web of Science only 2.54% used quantitative methodologies to assess the sustainability of the construction industry. • Quantitative sustainability assessment methods accounted for 2.54% of the total. • Few assessment methods have been developed for single-family dwellings. • The disproportionality of articles specific to environmental aspects. • Subjectivity in the assessments of environmental aspects of buildings. • Few articles from institutions in developing countries except for China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resource-based cities, which account for 43.6% of China's cities, have the industrial problem of heavy pollution, low efficiency, and irrational structure. Therefore, how to improve the sustainability of the industries in resource-based cites has become an important issue. First, from the perspective of ecology, this paper uses Lotka-Volterra model to reveal three basic sustainability promotion mechanisms of industries: the construction of circular economy system, the refinement of resource-based industries, and the cultivation of non-resource-based industries. Then, in order to explore how to use the three mechanisms to achieve better performance, a system dynamics model is established and the situation simulation is carried out. The results show that simply combining the three mechanisms has the worst performance, while the phased mode of "resource-based industry → circular economy → tertiary industry" can improve the performance by 164.82%. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of the above three mechanisms are also found. Construction of a circular economy can improve the environment and its economic output grows quickly while it excessively relies on the second industry. Refinement of resource-based industries can greatly promote economic output while crowding out non-resource-based industries and destroying the environment. Cultivation of non-resource-based industries requires a lot of resources. • The ecological explanation of typical mechanism is put forward. • Considering the effect of mechanisms under the restriction of policy capacity. • The characteristics and effects of typical mechanisms are simulated. • A comprehensively phased mechanism is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]