Abstract
There are a large number of historic blocks and a high proportion of seniors in Beijing Xicheng District, which is an important area where modern urban life and traditional physical space meet. With the renewal and construction of historic blocks, public space has become the key to reshape the historic blocks' living atmosphere. However, do these public spaces meet the living needs of most residents? Under the advocacy of the community life circle, we will return to observing residents' daily life and space needs and put forward the exploration of age-friendly renewal for the life circle of historic blocks. This paper takes seniors as the research object, selects the public space in the historic blocks of Beijing Xicheng District as sample spaces to explore the characteristics and influence of public space and seniors' behaviors. Through literature review, site survey, interview information to obtain relevant data, further expand the data induction statistics, model construction and impact analysis to carry out the research. The survey results show that: 1.The distribution of public space in the historic blocks is unbalanced, showing differences in quantity, area, function and other aspects, which is difficult to cover the living needs of residents fully. 2.Combined with the literature research and the observation of the behavior characteristics of seniors in public space, "communication" and "pass by" behaviors are the most common; The group behavior represented by "playing cards or playing chess and watching" is less likely to occur, and once it happens, a large number of people will gather. 3.It classifies behavior into static and dynamic and respectively discusses the influence of spatial form on its occurrence frequency. Found space area, the number of seats, enclosure degree of space to seniors' static behavior has a significant effect, space area and adjacent street width, the number of facilities has a significant influence on seniors' dynamic behavior. This paper aims to guide the age-friendly renewal of the public space in the historic blocks based on the analysis of the characteristics and influence of the public space and seniors' behaviors. Then, we propose some renewal strategies, such as the flexible layout of a multiform public space system, benign interaction between different behaviors and space, and ageing promotion of diverse space facilities. Keywords：Community life circle, historic blocks, public space, seniors' behaviors, age-friendly renewal
