An explorative study to unveil the interdependency of public housing related infrastructure assets in Hong Kong

Abstract

As a typical sector of social infrastructure, public housing in many regions is playing an important role in underpinning the well-being, social cohesion and economic growth, offering accommodations to large percentage of their population. However, management of such infrastructure assets faces great challenges across their different lifecycle stages—a small incident may exert a huge negative social impact or lead to a catastrophic economic loss due to the internal interdependency between public housing buildings and facilities and the external interdependency of public housing with other urban infrastructures. Whilst most available literatures on public housing now focus on discussions of higher strategies like privatization and decentralization, this paper commences the research of public housing management from infrastructure asset management (IAM) perspective to reduce the lifecycle and social cost and improve the transparency of public housing programs. Taking public housing in Hong Kong as cases, this study aims to examine the interdependency among public housing related infrastructure assets from multiple perspectives: from physical, functional and informational interactions to management practices. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with relevant stakeholders to chart out the interrelationships among different public housing related infrastructure assets and their management processes. A dependency matrix is developed to illustrate the interdependencies of different infrastructure assets. causal loop diagrams (CLD) are constructed to identify complicated interactions and feedback loops among interwoven public housing related infrastructure maintenance management processes. The matrix and the diagrams can be used to develop decision support tools for the management of public housing related infrastructure assets.