An Assessment of Sustainability for Residential Skyscrapers in Accordance with a Multicriteria Decision-Making Method: Nine Dubai Case Studies

Abstract

Residential skyscrapers (RSs) are very relevant to all aspects of sustainable development as an integral component of urban development. The need for high-rise buildings was first identified in Chicago in the later part of the nineteenth century. Today, more and more skyscrapers are being built to accommodate occupants in the small available land plots in the world’s megacities. In this paper, following the review of previous studies, a series of effective indicators are prioritized so that a model for the investigation of the sustainability performance in RSs that is related to the three aspects of sustainability is presented. The RSs should be designed to respond to different requirements during their life cycle, which includes environmental, social, and economic aspects of sustainable development in the initial design that results in a higher quality of life in the RSs. The method used in this paper is a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) method for sustainability assessment and the integrated value model for sustainable assessment (MIVES). Nine RSs as case studies have been evaluated in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Based on the multicriteria model used in this paper, the analyzed RSs in Dubai, UAE, have a sustainability performance in the range of 0.29 < SI < 0.62, where SI is the sustainability index. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the residential skyscraper’s (RSs) sustainability based on the integrated value model for sustainable assessment (MIVES), which is a decision-making approach. For the literature review, no high-rise building design and construction studies cover all the pillars of sustainability. Therefore, nine case studies were chosen in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and these were evaluated with the MIVES approach. The MIVES integrates three sustainability requirements (environmental, economic, and social), which use the concept of value functions and indicators based on the weight assignment. The formulas for the sustainability index (SI) were defined in this model. Each of these case studies has been quantitatively assessed, and the degree of sustainability of each tower was determined. All these data and results provided a framework and reference to establish a minimum SI that future RSs that are constructed in Dubai, UAE, should achieve. In addition, the evaluation of RSs might be reviewed from other dimensions of sustainability, for example, landscapes for the design of outdoor spaces.