Research On The Problems And Improvements Of Elderly-related Building Standards In China

With a rapidly ageing population,the construction amounts of aged care projects has soared in China.Elderly-related building standards(ERBSs)play an important role in the designing work of aged care projects,not only because their roles that as the means to ensure the design quality,but also as the ways to obtain design cognition.However,in recent years,China's ERBSs have gradually exposed some problems,which brought inappropriate constraints to the construction of projects,and caused incomplete design cognition as well.At the same time,under the influence of increasing marketlization in aged care industry and the transition of domestic standard regulatory system,the ERBSs also needs to reposition.In these contexts,how to impove the ERBSs becomes an urgent tasks.This research aims to find out the essential problems of ERBSs,and explore the improvements,which make ERBSs have a more positive impact in design practice of aged care projects.This research firstly identified the orientation and characteristics of China's ERBSs,that influenced by the standard regulatory regime and the development period of aged care industry,through retrospecting their development process.Secondly,by conducting four in-depth case studies on the design process of aged care projects,certain problems in the usage of ERBSs were analyzed,and the designers' ways of standard using as well as their requirements were discussed.Thirdly,through analyzing the revision process of two ERBS's cases,problems and requirements in developing ERBSs were decribed,so that the stakeholders' opinions and requirements were explored.Results show that,the engineering construction standard system which emerged from the planned economy system and the primary level of aged care industry at the early development stage have causes China's ERBSs been characterized by parallelization in system hierarchy,simplification of the formulation method,and perspective model in compilation.The oneness of the standard compliance approach has caused difficulty to cope with the differentiated construction conditions and operational demands of current aged care projects,which influenced the compliance of standards.The insufficiency of technical justification and unclarity of objectives have affected designers' willingness to use standards,thus lead to the decrease in standard usage.The defective coordination mechanism of standard development and limited treatment approach have brought difficulties in implementing the opinions and requirements of the stakeholders effectively.The study further proposed six core requirements as objectives of improving ERBSs.Based on summarizing the experience of other countries,the basis and challenges of improving ERBSs.during the current period were indicated.Finally,the study proposed the methods and approachs that can be used to improve ERBSs,which included the reconstitution of content structure,the optimization of developing process,and the shift of compiling model.The research results pertain directly to the compilation of ERBSs and provide references for relative work during the reforming period of engineering construction standards.