Integrated sustainability assessment of public rental housing community based on a hybrid method of AHP-Entropy Weight and Cloud Model

As an essential part of a city, community is significant to the sustainable development of the city. At present, research on community sustainability assessment systems is relatively scarce. The existing community sustainability assessment systems often lack integrated consideration of community sustainability. For example, these systems especially place emphasis on the ecological and environmental aspects, but the economic and social aspects of sustainability are partially ignored. In order to comprehensively evaluate the sustainability of a community, this paper draws on the “participatory philosophy” and constructs an integrated assessment indicator system that includes five dimensions: environment; economy; society; institution; and culture. On this basis, a new hybrid evaluation method based on analytical hierarchy process (AHP)-entropy weight and the cloud model is proposed to evaluate community sustainability. This method combines AHP and the entropy weight method to determine index weight, thus making full use of their respective advantages. At the same time, it makes use of the superiority of the cloud model to transform qualitative remarks into quantitative representations and to reflect fuzziness and randomness. To verify the feasibility of this method, a case study is carried out on the “Minxinjiayuan” public rental housing community in Chongqing, China. The results show that the overall sustainability of the community lies between the “middle” and “good” level, and closer to the “middle” level. The level of the economic and social sustainability is higher than that of the environmental, institutional and cultural sustainability.