With the growing challenge of aging populations around the world, the study of the care services for older adults is an essential initiative to accommodate the particular needs of the disadvantaged communities and promote social equity. Based on open-source data and the geographic information system (GIS), this paper quantifies and visualizes the imbalance in the spatial distribution of elderly care facilities in 14,578 neighborhoods in downtown (seven districts) Shanghai, China. Eight types of elderly care facilities were obtained from Shanghai elderly care service platform, divided into two categories according to their service scale. With the introduction of the improved Gaussian 2-step floating catchment area method, the accessibility of two category facilities was calculated. Through the global autocorrelation analysis, it is found that the accessibility of elderly care facilities has the characteristics of spatial agglomeration. Local autocorrelation analysis indicates the cold and hot spots in the accessibility agglomeration state of the two types of facilities, by which we summarized the characteristics of their spatial heterogeneity. It is found that for Category−Ⅰ, there is a large range of hot spots in Huangpu District. For Category−Ⅱ, the hot-spot and cold-spot areas show staggered distribution, and the two categories of hot spot distribution show a negative correlation. We conclude that the two categories are not evenly distributed in the urban area, which will lead to the low efficiency of resource allocation of elderly care facilities and have a negative impact on social fairness. This research offers a systematic method to study urban access to care services for older adults as well as a new perspective on improving social fairness.

With population ageing being a notable demographic phenomenon, aging in place is an efficient model to accommodate the mounting aging needs. Based on the community scale, this study takes the 15-min community-life circle as the basic research unit to investigate the imbalanced distribution of pension resources and its influencing factors in downtown Shanghai. We obtained six types of elderly care facilities data from the Shanghai elderly care service platform and utilized the Gaussian 2-step Floating Catchment Area method to calculate the accessibility of 6-type elderly care facilities. Then, we used the Entropy Weight Method to calculate the comprehensive accessibility of elderly care facilities. The Getis–Ord Gi* method was adopted to analyze the overall distribution, identifying the well-developed and the under-developed areas. To explore the influencing factors of the distribution, this paper obtained multi-source data to construct a total of 17 indicators and established a Random Forest model to identify the feature importance. With the selected eight factors, the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model was applied to study the spatial heterogeneity of influencing factors, and the model showed a good performance with the AdjR2 being 0.8364. The findings of this research reveal the following: (1) The distribution of six types of elderly care facilities is extremely uneven, with obvious spatial aggregation characteristics. Amongst the seven administrative regions, Huangpu District has the best accessibility to pension resources, while the resources in the other six regions are highly inadequate. (2) Essential influencing factors of the comprehensive accessibility of community-based elderly care facilities are accessibility of nursing institutions (positive), hotel density (positive), catering density (negative), education density (positive) and medical density (negative), while “rents”, “plot ratio” and “building density” have little impact on comprehensive accessibility. (3) The results of GWR revealed that the eight indicators are heterogeneous in space, all of which have bidirectional effects on comprehensive accessibility. By investigating the spatial distribution patterns and influencing factors of pension resources in Shanghai, this research could further contribute to establishing a sound community-based elderly care service system that improves older adults’ quality of life and promotes social fairness and justice.

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Streets are an essential element of urban safety governance and urban design, but they are designed with little regard for possible gender differences. This study proposes a safety perception evaluation method from the female perspective based on street view images (SVIs) and mobile phone data, taking the central city of Guangzhou as an example. The method relies on crowdsourced data and uses a machine learning model to predict the safety perception map. It combines the simulation of women's walking commuting paths to analyse the areas that need to be prioritised for improvement. Multiple linear regression was used to explain the relationship between safety perception and visual elements. The results showed the following: 1) There were differences in safety perceptions across genders. Women gave overall lower safety scores and more dispersed distribution of scores. 2) Approximately 11% of the streets in the study area showed weak perceived safety, and approximately 3% of these streets have high pedestrian flows and require priority improvements. 3) Safe visual elements in SVIs included the existence of roads, sidewalks, cars, railways, people, skyscrapers, and trees. Our findings can help urban designers determine how to evaluate urban safety and where to optimise key areas. Both have practical implications for urban planners seeking to create urban environments that promote greater safety.

Streets are an essential element of urban safety governance and urban design, but they are designed with little regard for possible gender differences. This study proposes a safety perception evaluation method from the female perspective based on street view images (SVIs) and mobile phone data, taking the central city of Guangzhou as an example. The method relies on crowdsourced data and uses a machine learning model to predict the safety perception map. It combines the simulation of women’s walking commuting paths to analyse the areas that need to be prioritised for improvement. Multiple linear regression was used to explain the relationship between safety perception and visual elements. The results showed the following: (1) There were differences in safety perceptions across genders. Women gave overall lower safety scores and a more dispersed distribution of scores. (2) Approximately 11% of the streets in the study area showed weak perceived safety, and approximately 3% of these streets have high pedestrian flows and require priority improvements. (3) Safe visual elements in SVIs included the existence of roads, sidewalks, cars, railways, people, skyscrapers, and trees. Our findings can help urban designers determine how to evaluate urban safety and where to optimise key areas. Both have practical implications for urban planners seeking to create urban environments that promote greater safety.

Research on historic preservation zones (HPZs) has recently attracted increasing attention from academia and industry. With eight Beijing typical HPZs selected, this study evaluates critical vitality characteristics and identifies the key influencing factors via multi-source data and machine learning technology. The vitality characteristics were identified from three dimensions: physical space vitality, cyberspace vitality, and sentiment degree. For influencing factors, 23 variables were constructed from four aspects (morphological, functional, visual, and traffic) using Computer Vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. Then, three vitality dimensions were introduced as responsive variables to establish three Random Forest Regression models. Lastly, each factor’s influence degree and direction on vitality were explained based on the feature importance and correlation analysis. Through this study, we have thoroughly examined the different influencing factors of vitality in HPZs and summarized the following academic findings: (1) Density of road intersections, the number of shops, and road impedance are the three of the most significant influencing factors that are negatively related to vitality. (2) Factors that have the highest impact on the sentiment degree are road impedance and the number of public infrastructures, which also negatively affect the population’s satisfaction. (3) The number of catering and entertainment amenities are critical factors that positively affect cyberspace’s vitality. In this study, all three models have adequately explained variables and generalization capability, which can be applied to other larger HPZs in Beijing. In addition, the findings of this study can also potentially provide insights for enhancing precinct vitality and the governance of HPZs in other cities.

With the growing challenge of aging populations around the world, the study of the elderly service is an essential initiative to accommodate the particular needs of the disadvantaged communities and promote social equity. Previous research frameworks are very casespecific with limited evaluation indicators that cannot be extended to other scenarios and fields. Based on multi-source data and Geographic Information System (GIS), this paper quantifies and visualises the imbalance in the spatial distribution of elderly services in 218 neighbourhoods in Shijingshan District, Beijing, China. Mortality data were obtained, and the most contributing indicators to mortality were investigated by correlation analysis. Finally, mapping between other facility indicators to mortality rates was constructed using machine learning to further investigate the factors influencing the quality of elderly services at the community level. The conclusion shows that the functional density of transportation facilities, medical facilities, living services facilities, and the accessibility of elderly care facilities are most negatively correlated with mortality. The correlation conclusion is combined with a machine learning prediction model to provide future recommendations for the construction of unbalanced elderly neighbourhoods. This research offers a novel systematic method to study urban access to elderly services as well as a new perspective on improving social fairness.

With China's fast urbanization, the study of the walkability of residents' life circles has become critical to improve people's quality of life. Traditional walkability calculations are based on Lawrence Frank's theory. However, the weighted calculation method cannot be adapted to ever-changing and complicated scenarios as the scope and topic of research transforming. This study investigated walkability at the community level by combining machine learning techniques with multi-source data. Feature indicators affecting walkability were estimated from multi-source data. Machine learning was used to refine the weighting calculation under the previous indicator framework. We compared the performance of 20 regression models from 6 different machine learning algorithms for estimating the walkability of 14578 communities in downtown Shanghai. It is concluded that the Bagged Tree Model (R2=0.86, RMSE=0.36862) achieves the best performance, which is used to revise the initial walkability index values. The workflow proposed in this paper allows for rapid application of expert empirical consensus to comprehensive urban design and detailed urban governance in the future.