A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Friendliness of Urban Facilities for the Elderly in Taipei City and New Taipei City

Abstract

To address the topic of building age-friendly cities that better meet the needs of the elderly in a sustainable-city-oriented manner, this paper focuses on the interaction between the needs of the elderly and urban facilities in the urban built environment in order to propose a comprehensive evaluation method regarding the friendliness of urban facilities with respect to the elderly in large urban areas. The development of the proposed method was guided by the distribution characteristics of the elderly population and combines a spatial measurement evaluation, which is based on the spatial distribution characteristics of urban facilities for the elderly, and a post-use measurement evaluation, which is based on the characteristics of use by the elderly. Taipei City and New Taipei City are then taken as examples for evaluation. From the final evaluation results of the Boston four-quadrant analysis, the areas with higher spatial and post-use metric evaluation values were defined as areas of high concern, while those with lower spatial and higher post-use metric evaluation values were defined as advantage-maintained areas. These two types of areas accounted for about 58% of the total area, and are distributed in the Taipei urban area and northeast New Taipei City. The areas with higher spatial and lower post-use metric evaluation values were defined as priority improvement areas, while those with lower spatial and post-use metric evaluation values were defined as key complement areas. These two types of area accounted for about 42%, and are mainly distributed in the northwest part of Taipei City, as well as the western and southern mountainous areas of New Taipei City. Accordingly, region-specific planning policy recommendations were provided.

Recovering the Stream

“…In 1987, the flood risk of Shezidao was further increased after the completion of the levees for Shanchong and Luzhou-also TAFCP projects-across the Danshui River in New Taipei City (Taipei City Government 1987; Figure 10.3). Some of Shezidao's residents staged several public protests to demand better FCI (Yang 2016).…”

“…It has not been reinforced since. However, given that there is still a huge gap in the protection standard between Shezidao and the rest of the city, in the following years, the more vocal Shezidao residents continued to call for the inclusion of Shezidao in the TAFCP (Yang 2016).…”

“…The illegal factories and dumps have led Shezidao to be labeled as "unregulated land" (Yang 2016). It would be impossible for any of the factories and dumps to appear in a flood zone without the government's lax execution of the development restriction in Shezidao.…”

“…Like the illegal factories, they were drawn by Shezidao's much cheaper rent, compared to other parts of Taipei. Currently, many socioeconomically disadvantaged people and minorities reside in Shezidao (Lin 2009;Yang 2016). For the past 20 years Shezidao has had a stable population of around 11,000 (Taipei City Government 2018).…”

“…In 1988, it proposed to develop Shezidao into a red-light and gambling district, because Shezidao's marginal and relatively isolated location makes it easier to concentrate and control these businesses. This development plan met strong resistance from local residents and women's rights organizations (Yang 2016). The master plan was eventually disapproved.…”