How Does the Living Street Environment in the Old Urban Districts Affect Walking Behavior? A General Multi-Factor Framework

Abstract

To strike a trade-off between walking behavior and street resource constraint, extensive research tends to focus on how the urban environment affects walking behavior. However, most of the existing impact measurements focus on the cities in low-latitude temperate environments, which may not truly reflect the situation when assessing high-latitude cities. To address this drawback, in this paper, a general multi-factor framework is introduced to quantify the influence of street-level environmental factors on walking behavior. Specifically, a framework is constructed by comprehensively considering the subjective data and the objective data of Harbin, China, which is mainly composed of multivariate measurement indicators, a multi-source data analysis library, and four-dimensional evaluation paradigm. The results indicate that two main measures can promote the current situation of human-oriented living street environment planning, namely, increasing the distribution of green facilities and life service facilities in the old urban districts living street, and paying attention to the diversity of street greening and street landscape. The proposed framework is conducive to improve the planning status of human-centered street environments and guide the construction of pedestrian-friendly life and healthy streets.