Quantitative Evaluation on Street Vitality: A Case Study of Zhoujiadu Community in Shanghai

Abstract

Streets functioning as important components of urban public space are not only the primary carriers of traffic but also essential spaces for individuals’ daily activities, including recreation and communication. The paper highlights the social characteristics of streets by integrating them into one single index of vitality. The application of open recourse data combined with empirical research forms the foundation of a quantitative exploration on the street vitality of Zhoujiadu Community in Shanghai. Supported by the ideology of street urbanism, this paper defines the concept of “street vitality”, and then constructs a quantitative evaluation index system. Afterwards, a multiple linear regression model is developed to explore the main influential factors of street vitality. This work evidences the relationship between the environment and citizens’ activities and is beneficial to the potential improvement of street space quality and the enhancement of streets with higher vitality. Results from this work proved that the constituent factors of social function density, mixing degree of social functions, distance from the nearest subway station and green view have strong impacts on street vitality, among which the social function density and mixing degree of social functions are paramount.

Evaluating the Effects of Built Environment on Street Vitality at the City Level: An Empirical Research Based on Spatial Panel Durbin Model

“…(1) Research on a certain street on the micro scale [15,16,44,47]. Based on pedestrians' perception of street space, these studies focus on a specific street in the city, evaluating the built environment factors closely related to street design and optimizing street space.…”

“…[28,32,33,60,62] and accessibility (bus station density, location, etc.) will affect street vitality [16,29,34]. However, other scholars question the impact of density and accessibility [63,64] and believe that high population density and excessive mixed land use may reduce walking behaviors [20].…”

“…Building density and floor area ratio have completely different effects on the vitalities of different development stages [28]. Commercial diversity, bus station density, length, and openness have no obvious correlation with street vitality [16], although some scholars have proved that the density of bus stops is positively correlated with travel behaviors [52,65].…”

“…First, most studies are conducted on the meso and micro scales, and limited studies assess the influence of the built environment on the street vitality at the city level [15]. Based on the manual survey data or GPS auxiliary equipment, they often focus on one single or several streets, which can hardly reflect the temporal and spatial characteristics of the street vitality across a wide range of time and space [16]. There should be differences in the influencing effects on different geographic scales [14,17,18].…”

Exploring the Correlation between Block Vitality and Block Environment Based on Multisource Big Data: Taking Wuhan City as an Example

“…With the development of open-source data in China, scholars have studied the relationship between block vitality and block environment in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen [20,25,41]. The existing inquiry on the relationship between urban vitality and environment in China suffers from the shortcomings of small research scope (only some streets are studied) and failure to consider spatial heterogeneity and temporal heterogeneity [2,41,42]. This study expanded the scope of the study based on the previous work and considered the lack of vitality comparison between workdays and weekends and the lack of human eye perception in vitality research in existing studies.…”