Evaluation Model on Residential Environment Quality of Local City Considering Personal Residential Preference - a Case Study of Saga

1. Background and purpose With the development of economy and society, as well as the growing demands on quality of life, the improvement of residential environment quality has become the key targets of city policy and urban planning, where the research on residential environment evaluation is the important first step. The study on Environment Quality Index (EQI) for residential area is one of the main fields of the research of residential environment, and many studies have been performed to provide methods to evaluate the quality of residential environments. However, most of these researches are carried out in the large central cities, such as in Tokyo, Kitakyushyu and so on, while in small local cities, such kinds of researches are not enough by far. Owing to the apparently different properties in political, economy, culture, geography and natural, as well as the variance in life style and residential preference, the assessment methodology and evaluation index system are sure to be distinct from big central cities. Therefore it is of great importance to improve the research on residential environment evaluation and to establish evaluation system suitable for small local cities instead of applying the big city model directly. On the other hand, most of the researches have been focusing on environment index and evaluation method. However, the residential environment evaluation is related to both objective factors and subjective factors, and the subjective factors are quite complicated because of individual subjective characteristics, such as life style, personal preference and so on. Thus, not only the index and method, but also the personal residential preference type, and its influence on evaluation are worth being studied. In this paper, through the case-study of Saga, the assessment index system and evaluation model for small local city considering personal preference for residential environment quality is studied, which may help to the improvement of residential environment design and construction efficiently and effectively.