This study focuses on the assessment of historic city vitality to address increasingly fragmented urban patterns and to prevent the decline of livability in older urban areas. In 1961, Jane Jacobs theorized urban vitality and found the main conditions that were required for the promotion of life in cities: diversity of land use, small block sizes, diversity of buildings with varied characteristics and ages, density of people and buildings, accessibility for all people without depending on private transport, and distance to border elements. Jacobs’ criteria for urban vitality has had an indisputable influence on urban researchers and planners especially in the Anglo-American context. This perspective has influenced the development of New Urbanism and similar planning policies, such as neo-traditional communities and transit oriented development, yet her theories have to be more substantiated in Asia’s developing cities, especially in China’s historic cities. In order to verify the significance of Jacobs’ urban vitality theory in Chinese historic cities, we develop a composite measure of 16 variables of built environment, and we test it using GIS-sDNA in a historic city with an aging population and low-income in Qingdao. A systematic approach to urban spatial analysis allows us to provide a detailed spatial interpretation of a historic city form. The results emphasize that historic cities vitality, far from being homogeneous, followed a multi-centered distribution pattern, which is related to the previous European planning of the region, where a grid-type pattern was more likely to disperse urban vitality. The results can serve as a useful framework for studying the livability and vitality of different areas of the city in different geographical contexts.
The residential block is the cognitive unit for residents to constitute urban imagery. As one of the most frequently used urban outdoor public spaces by residents, the thermal comfort of street canyons is an essential indicator for assessing sustainable and livable cities. The problem of the uncomfortable summer climate in the warm temperate zone of China has not been adequately studied. The study aims to analyze the influence of the building layout form of residential block units and block configuration on the outdoor summer thermal comfort of street canyons. Outdoor air temperature (Ta), mean radiant temperature (Tmrt), wind speed (Va), and physiological equivalent temperature (PET) were simulated using ENVI-met. A new index, PETws, was introduced based on a statistical analysis of the PET index to assess the overall street canyon thermal comfort of the block. The results indicate that the number of rows of buildings in the building row layout has a more significant effect on the summer thermal comfort PET of street canyons than the number of columns in the warm temperate zone, especially on N–S-oriented streets. Reducing the number of rows can increase the overall thermal comfort PETws of street canyons by a maximum of 2.2%. The best choice for the number of building columns is two columns. Adopting different block configurations can increase the thermal comfort PETws of street canyons by up to 2.5%. An optimal block form has been created to improve the overall street canyon summer thermal comfort of the block.
As an important public facility, the number, area, and scale of hospital buildings are growing rapidly. The efficiency of nurses’ rounds to beds is an important indicator of the efficiency of nursing units in ward buildings. Ward buildings occupy a very important position in the overall energy consumption of hospital building complexes. The type and scale of nursing unit floorplans are some of the key factors affecting the energy consumption of ward buildings. In this paper, three typical floorplan layout types of hospital ward buildings in cold regions of China are selected. The relationships between rounding efficiency, building energy consumption, floorplan layout, and building size were quantified using Origin based on linear regression and non-linear regression. The study showed that at 60 beds, the efficiency of nurse rounds was 35.68% higher in the double-corridor layout compared to the single-corridor. At 44 beds, the difference in average bed energy consumption between the double-corridor type and the single-corridor type is the greatest, with a 9.02% saving in energy consumption. This result confirms that the layout and scale of the ward building has a significant impact on the efficiency of nursing unit rounds and building energy efficiency.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.