Evaluating the accessibility of urban parks and waterfronts through online map services: A case study of Shaoxing, China
Introduction
Providing inclusive and accessible green spaces is an integral part of 2030 Agenda of the United Nations. Many cities worldwide have put forward policies to promote walking to parks and other natural spaces to improve citizens’ physical and mental health. Examples can be seen in Singapore and New York. Both aim to ensure their residents a ten-minute walk to parks by 2030 (Mahaseth, 2021; New York City, 2007). While the European Environment Agency suggested a fifteen minutes’ walk to green spaces (Stanners and Bourdeau, 1995, Chen et al., 2020), the Scottish government supported the idea of “twenty-minute neighborhoods” where people could meet their daily needs within twenty minutes’ walk (Scottish Government, 2020). In China, the State Council started a national campaign called “City in the Park” in 2018 to reinforce the importance of green infrastructure for peoples’ wellbeing (Wang et al., 2019). In response to this campaign, for example, Shanghai has launched the “fifteen-minute community life circle” as part of the city’s 2040 plan. This has been followed by other Chinese cities of various sizes and configurations.
In many cities which are undergoing rapid urbanization, urban parks usually give way to other land uses (Wolch et al., 2005; Tang and Wang, 2008; Lee and Hong, 2013; Rigolon and Németh, 2021). In some cities, even though green space quota seems to have been achieved, spatial inequity is still significant in residential areas. For a household or community, walking distance to these places depends on its specific location, nearby facilities, and street networks. Therefore, it is fundamental to identify the walking routes at the household level citywide to understand any relevant spatial patterns and inequality of accessibility, particularly for the venerable groups and groups with mobility issues.
Many existing studies and planning practice measured accessibility to natural environment in linear distance between locations, and ignored possible differences among different route choices, particularly with regards to gated communities. Here we used the Baidu Map, a widely-used online map service (OMS) in China, to obtain accurate walking routes from individual households to the parks and waterfronts in a medium-sized city. Cities of this size and with abundant canals are under-represented in the literature hitherto. The walking routes recommended by Baidu Map are the shortest distance that residents must travel to access the natural environment, which are more precise than the conventional measure of linear distance. This online map service and relevant big data opens new opportunities for researchers who normally have little access to official land survey maps in China (e.g., the equivalence of the Ordinance Survey map in the UK), to carry out urban analysis as shown in this present study.
Shaoxing is a typical medium-sized water city in the Yangtze Delta region of China. The topography of Shaoxing features plain areas, canals and low hills. Some of the hills in the city are developed into parks since the 1990 s, which together with the canals are the main natural resources in the city. These two types of natural environment add complexity for testing out the approach proposed in this research which combines the new data from the online map service and field survey. This makes the city an appropriate case study. This research not only takes the locations of parks and canals into consideration, but also zooms in and identifies their exact entrances as parks are often gated and canals have many specific access points, to inform strategies for design and planning intervention.
The following section of the paper reviews the literature on the benefits of urban natural environments, the concept of accessibility, catchment areas, and the emerging studies using online map services. This is followed by a methodology section explaining how we depict the catchment areas of parks and waterfront spaces in this research. The results section reports our analysis of the number of households in Shaoxing within 500 m, 1000 m, and 1500 m walking distances to the parks and waterfronts and their choices of parks within these distances. Compared to the parks, waterfronts of the canals are currently underused due to barriers and years of neglect. To take advantage of these assets, evaluating the accessibility potential of canals a scenario study is a necessary step to inform planning and retrofit design in the future. A discussion of the method, its contribution to knowledge, and recommendations for enhancing accessibility of urban natural spaces in Shaoxing are proposed in the final section.
Section snippets
Benefits of walking to urban natural environments
Urban parks and other natural environments in cities have prominent social, ecological, economic, and health benefits for their residents (Bedimo-Rung et al., 2005, Loures et al., 2007). Studies have suggested that urban parks can strengthen social ties, relieve mental stress (Ulrich et al., 1991, Woo et al., 2009), save energy (Zhou and Rana, 2012), reduce surface runoff of rainwater (Sadeghian and Vardanyan, 2013), mitigate urban heat-island effects (Yan et al., 2018, Huang et al., 2021), and
The study area
Shaoxing is located in the southeast of China, with a history of more than 2500 years and a population of five million. There are 6759 canals in Shaoxing, accounting for about 10% of the urban area. Most of them run north-south or east-west in a chessboard pattern (Peng et al., 2019). The configuration of canals has made Shaoxing a well-known water town for hundreds of years (Fig. 1). In 2019, the Shaoxing government issued regulations and policies to promote cycling and to prioritize walking
Household access to parks
The results show that there are 843 (19.91% of the total), 2195 (44.45%) and 3227 (65.35%) residential building POIs within 500 m, 1000 m and 1500 m walking distance of nearby urban parks respectively (Table 3). The underserved POIs are mostly located in the Jishan, Chengnan, Beihai sub-districts and the periphery areas of the Second Ring Road (Fig. 5). These areas need financial and administrative support for park development and the detailed suggestion is explained in Section 5.
There is a
Discussion
This study uses data from the online map services to simulate as closely as possible the shortest walking routes that people take from their home to the nearby natural environment. The analysis reveals great inequality among households in urban park access, which can be attributed to the combined consequence of urban development patterns (e.g., gated community) and natural topography. It also unfolds the potential of remedying the inequity with appropriate planning, particularly with regard to
Conclusion
The walking distance along specific routes from households to nearby parks and waterfronts is a basic measure to evaluate the service of natural environment in cities. Acquiring the routes from home to parks and waterfront at the household level citywide would be impossible for researchers if this OMS data was not available. In this paper, we presented a pragmatic approach to delineate walking catchment based on the shortest routes to evaluate the accessibility of natural spaces. It also
Funding
This work was supported by NSF of China [52078254, 31971721], the Humanity and Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [20YJAZH115] and Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and /or publication of this article.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the revision of the paper Special thanks go to Prof. Lingyun Han from The Jiangsu Second Normal University for her insightful suggestions, and Dr. Zhenqi Zhou from University at Buffalo (SUNY) for coding assistance.
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