Developing Evaluation Tool for Mid-Rise Apartments in Pakistan

Rapid urbanization in major urban centers of Pakistan is leading to the development of multi-story buildings for accommodating growing population and more business. Presently, no safety standards have been followed in multistorey buildings of Pakistan except a few buildings and there is a dire need to regulated the vertical growth in major urban centers of Pakistan This study aims to develop an evaluation System which will evaluate multistory apartments of Pakistan and will promote a well-planned vertical growth. Building Rating System of Pakistan and those used worldwide either focuses on environmental aspects only or not addressing the issues prevalent in Pakistan. The new evaluation system will include all aspects of sustainability as well addressing thelocal issues and concerns The methodology used for developing Evaluation system involved collection of Assessment Criteria from literature and then ranking them through expert's survey. Afterwards, Exploratory Factor Analysis technique was adopted to reduce large number of variables in the proposed building rating system by extracting important ones from a large pool as well to identify the new Factor Structure and to give weightage to each item on a rating scale. Proposed Evaluation system has a total of 230assessment criteria grouped under 8 main categories for evaluating mid-rise apartments. Weighing analysis of expert survey showed that all criteria are almost equally important and has gained almost equal weightages unlike Green Rating systems in which environmental factors has more weightages in the priority ranking compared to social, economic and other factors.