Evaluating the social effectiveness of the revitalisation scheme by accessibility : physical, programmatic and heritage-knowledge accessibility of the Jao Tsung-I Academy

Abstract

Revitalisation Scheme is the major heritage conservation scheme initiated by the Hong Kong Government following the Government Policy Address 2007-2008 for adaptive reuse of Government-owned historic buildings. So far, four batches of Revitalisation Scheme with a total of 15 projects has been launched.

According to Legislative Council paper, technical, management and social criteria are targeted to be achieve by the Revitalisation Scheme. However, even though the Revitalisation Scheme had already proceed to a stage that all the six batch one projects had already been completed and in full operation, so far there is no post-construction evaluation on whether or not the original target could be successfully achieved.

This dissertation focuses on social effectiveness of Revitalisation Scheme, which is the most important criteria originally targeted to achieve as stated in the Legislative Council paper. By analysis of social effectiveness against the Conservation Principles Policies and Guidance issued by English Heritage in 2008, three major factors are established for measuring the degree of social effectiveness, namely, physical accessibility, programmatic accessibility and heritage-knowledge accessibility. These factors are adopted in the paper to evaluate the social effectiveness of the Revitalisation Scheme overall, and detail evaluation on a completed and operating batch one project Conversion of the Former Lai Chi Kok Hospital into Jao Tsung-I Academy, in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the post-construction evaluation process, and the importance of post-construction evaluation of the Revitalisation Scheme.