Advancing neighbourhood sustainability assessment by accounting for sustainable development goals: A case study of Sha Tin neighbourhood in Hong Kong

Traditional triple bottom line approach used in existing neighbourhood sustainability assessment (NSA) tools provide an unbalanced focus on sustainability dimensions and are non-spatial. As a consequence, these tools may not aid decision-making process of different stakeholders. For this purpose, we propose an urban sustainability spatial hotspot analysis that integrates the Five Capitals Model (FCM) with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The FCM based NSA framework redefines sustainability in existing NSA tools as it considers the maintenance of five major stocks – natural, social, human, financial, and manufactured – in a neighbourhood. The evaluation of the flow of these stocks is conducted at the level of each residential estate based on indicators that are mapped to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). GIS is integrated to facilitate bottom-up model of indicator development with high-resolution data and discover spatial inequalities through heat maps. The developed method is applied to Sha Tin neighbourhood in Hong Kong. Heat maps generated identify priority intervention areas in Sha Tin that need much attention. The developed tool aims to democratize the use of NSAs by addressing different decision-making challenges for a diverse set of stakeholders across various levels.