Evaluating residents’ satisfaction before and after regeneration. The case of a high-density resettlement neighbourhood in Suzhou, China

The urban residential regeneration strongly supported by the 14th five-year plan of China should achieve social sustainability. Assessing residents’ satisfaction with the housing quality and living environment is essential for social sustainability and, therefore, should be considered in any transformation process. This study investigates which factors affect residents’ satisfaction significantly in high-dense resettlement neighbourhoods, focusing on housing conditions and the community environment. The selected case study is Nanhuan Village, a large resettlement neighbourhood in Suzhou built in the early “80s with medium-density multi-storey buildings and partly transformed with high-density high-rises in 2010. The study analyses residents” satisfaction before and after the regeneration and adopts a mixed research method: in-depth interviews with community managers and designers, fieldwork, and a structured questionnaire survey with residents to determine the influencing factors of satisfaction analysed by a structural equation model. The study identifies 24 indicators and the results highlight what matters for the residents: “community environment”, “property management”, and “surrounding facilities” are the factors that most significantly impact the residents’ satisfaction, even though there are different opinions between the residents of the old part and the regenerated part. The results are surprising: it is not the residential unit that mostly impacts the assessment—once a decent dwelling is provided—but the urban environment. The results also reveal that the densification realized by the transformation is not perceived as a problem. The results of this study can contribute to the definition of the government’s urban regeneration policy.