Sixty-Year Changes in Residential Landscapes in Beijing: A Perspective from Both the Horizontal (2D) and Vertical (3D) Dimensions

Abstract

Landscape changes associated with urbanization can lead to many serious ecological and environmental problems. Quantifying the vertical structure of the urban landscape and its change is important to understand its social and ecological impacts, but previous studies mainly focus on urban horizontal expansion and its impacts on land cover/land use change. This papers focuses on the residential landscape to investigate how the vertical dimension of the urban landscape (i.e., building height) change through time, and how such change is related to changes in the horizontal dimension of the landscape, using Beijing, the capital of China, as a case study. We quantified the expansion of the residential neighborhoods from 1949 to 2009, and changes in vegetation coverage, building density, and building height within these neighborhoods, using 1 m spatial resolution imagery. One-way ANOVA and correlation analysis were used to examine the relationships of building height to vegetation coverage and building density. We found: (1) The residential areas expanded rapidly and were dominated by outward growth, with much less within-city infilling. The growth rate varied greatly through time, first increasing from 1949-2004 and then decreasing from [2005][2006][2007][2008][2009]. The expansion direction of newly built residential neighborhoods shifted from west to north in a clockwise direction. (2) The vertical structure of residential neighborhoods changed with time and varied in space, forming a "low-high" pattern from urban central areas to the urban edges within the 5th ring road of Beijing. (3) The residential neighborhoods built in different time periods had significant differences in vegetation coverage, building density, and building height. The residential neighborhoods built in more recent years tended to have taller buildings, lower building density and lower vegetation coverage.

Three-Dimensional Urban Expansion Analysis of Valley-Type Cities: A Case Study of Chengguan District, Lanzhou, China

“…In the vertical direction, it is different from the classic shape of "high center, low periphery" [21,27], showing a bimodal urban form. We also found that, in recent years, new construction in Chengguan District consisted more often in high-rise buildings taller than 50 m instead of small high-rise buildings of 30-50 m. Similarly to the development in Beijing [28], higher buildings were more efficient at meeting the need of accelerated population growth, and enhanced human comfort by reducing building density, reducing surface temperature, and improving the greening of the environment. However, this phenomenon also reflects the large population density in Chengguan District.…”

“…The built years and floors information was obtained from the real-estate sale website "Anjuke" (www.anjuke.com) [31]. We found that most of the footprints data was correct [28] by comparing them to the 2018 Gaofen-2 satellite images of the study area, but a considerable amount of floors information was missing. The remaining building footprints of the missing or non-updated areas were manually digitized from Gaofen-2 satellite images, and their floors number were found from "Anjuke" website data or counted with windows from satellite images by referring to Baidu Map Street View data.…”

“…Aerial photographs, historical topographic maps, and high-resolution images developed in recent years and network data or records have made it possible. For example, Zheng et al [28] used GeoEye images and network data including building height and built year to obtain building footprints and their heights of the residential neighborhoods in Beijing from 1949 to 2009 for residential landscape change analysis. Besides, the analytical methods previous studies employed can only analyze the 3D expansion of entire city or block in terms of amount, but not spatially.…”

“…Similarly, findings in Shanghai and in Greece [18,27] shows that, cities often alternate their expansion process between phases of horizontal growth and vertical growth. Other studies found that residential neighborhoods of Beijing form a "low-high" pattern from the urban central areas to the urban edges [28], and the districts architectural landscape differentiation in Qingdao is more consistent with their diverse development history, function, and planning [19]. Other studies simulated the process of urban expansion in Surrey, Canada, and Wuhan, China.…”

Time-Series Analysis Reveals Intensified Urban Heat Island Effects but without Significant Urban Warming

“…While the urban areas from 2000-2015 overall had an increasing LST trend, a relatively large proportion (38.50%) of OUA had a trend of cooling. This was likely due to increased efforts dedicated to urban greening in Beijing, such as the "Plant Where Possible" policy in the urban core areas [81,82], which have led to the establishment of lots of new urban vegetation and parks in old urban areas [81,83]. Such greening efforts can help reduce LST in urban areas [53,54,59,84].…”