Understanding the Living Conditions of Chinese Urban Neighborhoods through Social Infrastructure Configurations: The Case Study of Tianjin

The Spatial Distribution and Influencing Factors of Urban Cultural and Entertainment Facilities in Beijing

Cultural and entertainment facilities are an important mainstay for urban development and the well-being of urban residents. Studying their spatial distribution is thus of great significance for improving urban functions and shaping urban characteristics. This paper uses the Simpson index, grid method, kernel density, nearest neighbor analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis to present in detail the spatial pattern, hotspot distribution and clustering characteristics of urban cultural and entertainment facilities in Beijing. With the help of the spatial lag model, the main factors affecting the spatial distribution of the facilities are explored. The results are as follows: Different types of cultural and entertainment facilities have different spatial agglomeration effects, which are closely related to the historical background of Beijing, industrial distribution, and the living needs of residents; the facilities generally present a spatial distribution with prominent centrality, strong clustering and significant heterogeneity; and financial insurance institution density, building density, securities company density, housing rent and distance to nearest scenic spot are the main factors affecting the distribution of the facilities. Analyzing the distribution characteristics and influencing factors of urban cultural and entertainment facilities in Beijing will provide typical cases and decision-making references that can underpin the informed layout and planning of urban cultural and entertainment industries and facilities.

The Application of the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process in the Assessment and Improvement of the Human Settlement Environment

With the development of urbanization in developing countries, some large cities have experienced rapid population growth and industrial expansion in a short period of time. In order to reasonably expand the scale of the city and guide the orderly outward movement of population and industries, it is urgent to improve the human settlement environment (THSE) in the surrounding areas of large cities. In the case of limited financial funds, different areas around the city need to be improved one by one according to the order of improvement grades. Since THSE is a comprehensive system involving multiple levels and indexes, it is difficult to assess it in a simple way. The previous assessment of THSE mainly focused on qualitative and semi-quantitative aspects, with poor accuracy. In this paper, the author takes JianYang County under the jurisdiction of Chengdu City in Southwest China as an example and uses the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to quantitatively calculate the improvement grade of THSE in 55 townships of JianYang County. The author carried out an investigation for more than one year. According to the actual situation of JianYang County, five primary indexes and 22 secondary indexes were selected to establish a comprehensive evaluation index system. This index system contains 1210 statistical data points, and more than 30,000 data points were calculated and derived in this article. Finally, the author calculated the improvement grade of 55 townships by FAHP quantitatively and carried out a horizontal comparison of townships within the same grade to further determine the order of improvement of THSE.

Daily Accessed Street Greenery and Housing Price: Measuring Economic Performance of Human-Scale Streetscapes via New Urban Data

The protective effects of street greenery on ecological, psychological, and behavioral phenomena have been well recognized. Nevertheless, the potential economic effect of daily accessed street greenery, i.e., a human-scale and perceptual-oriented quality focusing on exposure to street greenery in people’s daily lives, has not been fully studied because a quantitative measuring of this human-scale indicator is hard to achieve. This study was an attempt in this direction with the help of new urban data and new analytical tools. Shanghai, which has a mature real estate market, was selected for study, and the housing prices of 1395 private neighborhoods in its city center were collected. We selected more than forty variables that were classified under five categories—location features, distances to the closest facilities, density of facilities within a certain radius, housing and neighborhood features, and daily accessed street greenery—in a hedonic pricing model. The distance and density of facilities were computed through a massive number of points-of-interest and a geographical information system. The visible street greenery was collected from Baidu street view images and then measured via a machine-learning algorithm, while accessibility was measured through space syntax. In addition to the well-recognized effects previously discovered, the results show that visible street greenery and street accessibility at global scale hold significant positive coefficients for housing prices. Visible street greenery even obtains the second-highest regression coefficient in the model. Moreover, the combined assessment, the co-presence of local-scale accessibility and eye-level greenery, is significant for housing price as well. This study provides a scientific and quantitative support for the significance of human-scale street greenery, making it an important issue in urban greening policy for urban planners and decision makers.

Spatial Organization of Hierarchical Medical Services within the City Proper of Tianjin, China: Towards Efficient Medical Alliances

To address the low performance of health care service delivery in the half-market system, the Chinese government has begun to advocate the medical alliance (MA) recently. Instead of strict regulations on the procedure of diagnosis and treatment, flexible resource sharing among medical institutions of different grades inside each MA is encouraged. By now, many attempts have been made for MA establishment from different perspectives, but there is no effective model maturely developed. For the promotion of the spatial accessibility to medical services at different levels, it is important to organize the hierarchial medial services according to the distributions of different grades of health care facilities in a city. With the city proper of Tianjin as the study case, we explored the optimal establishment of MAs using the geographic information system (GIS). By means of the Voronoi Diagrams, the service regions of different medical institutions were precisely defined and the organizational structure of hierarchical medical services in MAs was determined. Through interpolation analysis, accessibility to different levels of medical services was measured, and on this basis, discussions were conducted on the service efficiency of the MAs. According to the results from Tianjin, (1) under the proposed organizational model for MAs, the fit of the service regions of the first grade and the other two higher grades of medical institutions was good. but the fit of the second and the third grade medical institutions was insufficient. (2) Although the overall service efficiency was excellent, there were still deficiencies in a number of the MAs. (3) Increasing the number of second and third grade medical institutions in specific regions near the city’s edge, as well as the number of first grade institutions, could further improve the performance of hierarchical medical services.