Abstract
Abstract: Since current urban development comes along with continued increasing population growth, enhancing the living quality of urban dwellers is a central concern for implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11-to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. As the important space entity with natural biological activity and regenerative mechanism in the urban environment, park greenspace has been shown to benefit human physical and psychological well-being. How to plan urban park greenspaces effectively and equitably is still a vital task especially in the compact urban context, where the number and area of urban natural remnants are usually constrained. In the process of urban planning, both the deficiency assessment of park greenspace distribution mostly based on the simple buffer by bird path and the arbitrary site selection in the filling-in mode could result in a greater policymaking error. In this case study of Wuxi City, facilitated by the multi-source big data, a digital landscape approach was explored for optimization of urban park greenspace distribution. The improved two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method was employed in combination with the network analyst in ArcGIS. The districts with low accessibility to urban park greenspaces were mapped as the main zones for equity promotion. Then combining the multiple potential factors, including demographics, land use type, the pattern of natural elements and redevelopment policies of inefficient urban land, the key plots for urban park greenspace layout were identified based on the location-allocation (LA) model. The results indicated the significant spatial gradient pattern of accessibility index and the lower spatial fitting degree between service capacity of urban park greenspaces and users’ demand in the old town of Wuxi. Additionally, an optimization strategy operably for urban park greenspace distribution to improve the accessibility level was proposed, which prioritizing the existing urban natural background, integrating urban inventory space and balancing the needs of urban dwellers. Finally, the conclusion emphasized the important role of building the urban blue-green park system in terms of accessibility. This case study could conduct the distribution optimization of urban park greenspaces effectively with the aim of helping city managers and planners promote an environmentally equitable and sustainable life. Keywords: urban park greenspace accessibility, distribution optimization, 2SFCA method, LA model, Wuxi City. References: Chen, Y., Yue, W., & Rosa, D. L. (2020) Which communities have better accessibility to green space? An investigation into environmental inequality using big data. Landscape and Urban Planning 204, 103919. Gupta, K., Roy, A., Luthra, K., Maithani, S., & Mahavir. (2016). GIS based analysis for assessing the accessibility at hierarchical levels of urban green spaces. Urban Forestry& Urban Greening, 18, 198–211. Krekel, C., Kolbe, J., & Wüstemann, H. (2016). The greener, the happier? The effect of urban land use on residential well-being. Ecological Economics, 121, 117–127.
