The evaluation of urban spatial quality and utility trade-offs for Post-COVID working preferences: a case study of Hong Kong

Abstract

The formation of urban districts and the appeal of densely populated areas reflect a spatial equilibrium in which workers migrate to locations with greater urban vitality but diminished environmental qualities. However, the pandemic and associated health concerns have accelerated remote and hybrid work modes, altered people's sense of place and appreciation of urban density, and transformed perceptions of desirable places to live and work. This study presents a systematic method for evaluating the trade-offs between perceived urban environmental qualities and urban amenities by analysing post-pandemic urban residence preferences. By evaluating neighbourhood Street View Imagery (SVI) and urban amenity data, such as park sizes, the study collects subjective opinions from surveys on two working conditions (work-from-office or from-home). On this basis, several Machine Learning (ML) models were trained to predict the preference scores for both work modes. In light of the complexity of work-from-home preferences, the results demonstrate that the method predicts work-from-office scores with greater precision. In the post-pandemic era, the research aims to shed light on the development of a valuable instrument for driving and evaluating urban design strategies based on the potential self-organisation of work-life patterns and social profiles in designated neighbourhoods.

Identification of Inefficient Urban Land for Urban Regeneration Considering Land Use Differentiation

“…PD is the number of people per unit area, indicating the population size and demand scale for infrastructures of residential land [12]. PA is the shortest time for residents to parks and squares, indicating the availability of recreation and outdoor activities of residential land [32,53]. CSC is the degree of clustering of commercial facilities, indicating the convenience of residents to access commercial services near their residential area [12,32].…”

“…Transportation condition includes metro coverage (MC), 4AB, 8AB, and 12AB. MC is the number of metro stations within a 500 m radius of the commercial land, reflecting the convenience and accessibility of the metro service [47,53,58]. 4AB, 8AB, and 12AB were used to assess the accessibility of the road network for commercial land [32,54,55].…”

Identifying Urban Park Events through Computer Vision-Assisted Categorization of Publicly-Available Imagery

“…Although a significant number of studies have been conducted to determine the use of urban parks, the majority of these studies have focused quantitatively on the frequency or intensity of use [8][9][10][11][12][13]. Some emerging studies deploy crowd-sourcing visual survey to effectively collect public opinions (emotions and perceptions) on urban spaces including streetscapes and urban parks [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Some studies also investigated the demographics of park users [14][15][16], and the periods of time parks are used [14].…”