Sustainable Development Research on the Spatial Differences in the Elderly Suitability of Shanghai Urban Parks

Abstract

As an important subset of the urban population and a major contributor to urban social wealth, the elderly play an important role in a city’s sustainable development. Based on data from the statistical yearbook and an empirical investigation, this paper evaluated the elderly suitability of 75 parks in China’s Shanghai Central District using a self-defined Python script tool based on ArcGIS. According to spatial differences in the elderly suitability of parks, we employed spatial interpolation to explore the reasons for variations in park services in different residential spaces in Shanghai Central District. The results revealed the following: (1) the elderly suitability of parks in Shanghai Central District decreases gradually from the inner ring to the outer ring; (2) the park accessibility in Shanghai Central District is generally low, and the park service space can be divided into five categories ranging from “low accessibility, super-low elderly suitability” to “high accessibility, high elderly suitability”; and (3) the advantages of regional function and location, the development of regional culture and tourism economy, and the implementation of regional elderly-care policies are factors promoting the improvement of the elderly suitability of regional park services. Finally, this paper provided scientific decision-making suggestions for Shanghai and other aging cities to optimize the elderly suitability of urban parks.

Elderly Suitability of Park Recreational Space Layout Based on Visual Landscape Evaluation

“…According to the aforementioned literature analysis, there are many factors that affect the visual landscape, but many studies on quality are based on subjective judgment. Therefore, to further understand the needs of the elderly in the park visual landscape and the factors influencing the park visual landscape for the elderly, we designed a paper questionnaire according to the research in the literature [5,8,14,34,[37][38][39] and conducted a questionnaire survey on some elderly people in five local parks. A total of 90 questionnaires were issued, and 74 valid questionnaires were collected.…”

“…ArcPy is a Python site package launched by ESRI after ArcGIS 10.0 containing 91 functions, 37 classes, and 5 modules; it allows users to flexibly create simple or complex workflows through Python Scripting for ArcGIS, aiding in the efficient automation of geographic processing tasks [5,[41][42][43]. Therefore, referring to the manual process of using ArcGIS intervisibility analysis and viewshed analysis tools [44], as well as documents on the use of the ArcPy function, this study measured the above three evaluation indices according to the following methods.…”

“…They play an indispensable role in maintaining the physical and mental health of the elderly and promoting social interaction. Therefore, faced with the severe trend in population aging, an increasing number of scholars have begun to focus on the elderly suitability of parks (also referred to as "aging-suitability" [4], which essentially reflects the suitability of parks for the elderly) and have aimed to improve this suitability to ameliorate the health and living conditions of the elderly, finally promoting the sustainable development of urban society [4,5].…”

“…Visually attractive outdoor spaces can often result in a higher or better perceived suitability [9]. However, at present, scholars have considered the suitability of parks for the elderly only from the perspective of the facility configuration [5,[10][11][12], space security [5,12], space accessibility [5,13], space sociality, environmental comfort [5,14], and space diversity and scale [15]. This shows that although there is evidence that the elderly have high-quality visual needs for park space [14], there is no research to date that evaluates the elderly suitability of parks from the perspective of vision or visual landscapes.…”

Regional differences in socioeconomic trends: The spatiotemporal evolution from individual cities to a megacity region over a long time series

“…Because of the “reform and opening-up” policy, China has been experiencing rapid changes in recent decades, and the markets related to productivity vary among cities and further exhibit different levels of economic progress [ 3 ]. The existing research has investigated many types of regional differences including residential environments [ 4 , 5 ], housing prices [ 6 ], environmental pollution and transportation [ 7 , 8 ]. These spatiotemporal socioeconomic differences have been regarded as one of the significant challenges in China [ 9 ], especially in megacity regions with urban agglomerations, such as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA).…”