Sustainable development of construction industry : the China case

Sustainable development is a significant research theme in various fields. With the developments to theory, the fundamental concept of sustainable development has expanded from only the environment perspective to now including economic, social and environment perspectives. As a resource-intensive industry, the policy, processes and practices in relation to sustainable development of the construction industry is critical. An important theoretical and practical concern is the creation of indicator systems that assist with the measurement of sustainable urban development. However there is no an internationally agreed one especially for construction industry. Past research and practice has tended to focus on the measurement of sustainability of the construction projects in relation to the individual projects or at the organizational level. Zhang and London (2011) generated a new sustainable development measurement according to the characteristics of construction industry, the availability of data and other sustainable development indicators system which have been proposed before. This measurement will be used to analyze the performance of Chinese construction industry's sustainability from 2001 to 2010.