Evidence Alignment and Transfer Boundaries in Built-Environment Evaluation

Abstract

A central challenge in built-environment evaluation is to compare studies whose mechanisms and validation settings do not share a single denominator. The present review uses built-environment indicators, spatial correlation, and a dual-perspective evaluation framework for everyday public space and post-occupancy evaluation and mechanism diagnosis for rural construction as focal cases for a boundary-aware synthesis. The review draws on two focal records and 12 established sources already present in the project evidence cache. Its comparative framework links indicator design, spatial analysis, and post-occupancy evaluation to downstream questions of stakeholder perspectives and policy translation. The combined literature indicates that methodological gains become actionable only when indicator design and spatial analysis are evaluated together and when limits associated with policy translation are explicit. This shifts the emphasis from isolated scores toward traceable chains of evidence and decision relevance. The contribution is a decision-oriented synthesis that connects method selection to failure cost and treats reproducibility, provenance, and bounded generalization as first-order design requirements.