The Varying Relationships between Multidimensional Urban Form and Urban Vitality in Chinese Megacities: Insights from a Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Substantial efforts have been devoted to investigating the effects of urban form on fundamental natural and social patterns. Such efforts, however, focus mostly on the urban and regional scales. Despite fine-scale investigations that have been conducted recently to analyze how the urban landscape influences urban vitality at the local scale, these studies are often based on the two-dimensional shape of spaces and ignore the diversification of economies and activities in various cities throughout the day. This work examined the relationships between multidimensional urban form and urban vitality at the street block level and explored their variations across fifteen megacities in China. Based on the framework of Conzen’s town-plan analysis, multidimensional urban form was quantified from three fundamental aspects: city plan, building forms, and land utilization. The local vitality was measured in social and economic dimensions at different times of day using restaurant data and nighttime lights. Our results revealed the time- and place-varying relationships between urban form and urban vitality and indicated the successes and failures of widely accepted norms of a good city form. In particular, connectivity, compactness, building arrangement, iconic buildings, transport facilities, and open and green spaces were found to be important for urban vitality, whereas land-use mixture and building density presented limited or unintended effects. Furthermore, some urban form indicators could contrarily contribute to vitality for different cities, times, or dimensions, suggesting that urban spaces bearing these qualifications might not be constantly attractive. We suggest a consideration of local spatiotemporal characteristics in urban revitalization policies.

大量的研究致力于探讨城市形态对自然和社会的重要形态的影响。然而, 这些研究主要关注城市和地区。近来, 出现了在精细尺度上、在局部范围内分析城市景观对城市活力的影响的研究。但这些研究往往基于空间的二维形态, 忽略了城市在一天内的经济和活动的多样性。本文在街区尺度上, 考察了多维城市形态与城市活力之间的关系, 探讨了这种关系在中国15个特大城市中的差异。基于Conzen城镇规划分析框架, 从城市规划、建筑形态和土地利用这三个重要方面, 本文量化了多维城市形态。利用餐饮数据和夜灯, 在一天的不同时间, 计算了局部地区在社会和经济层面上的活力。我们的研究结果, 揭示了城市形态和城市活力之间的随着时间和地点而变化的关系, 并指出了被广泛认可的良好城市形态标准的成功与失败。特别的, 连接性、紧凑性、建筑布局、标志性建筑、交通设施、开放和绿色空间等, 对城市活力非常重要；而混合土地利用和建筑密度对城市活力的影响有限或者可以忽略不计。此外, 一些城市形态指标可能对不同城市、不同时间或不同维度的活力产生相反的影响, 这表明具有这些特征的城市空间可能不会一直具有吸引力。我们建议在城市振兴政策中, 考虑局部地区的时空特征。