The role of urban environment in everyday life : a multi-scale analysis

Abstract

The everyday perspective is essential for human-centered geography. In fact, the key to addressing many global challenges we are facing today, such as climate change, urbanization, and population aging, may lie in people’s everyday behavior. As more and more people are living in cities, urban environment plays an increasingly important role in shaping people’s everyday activities. Therefore, there are opportunities to synthesize the goals of improving livability and promoting sustainability in cities through better planning, design, and management of the urban environment. With this understanding, this thesis investigates how the urban environment influences people’s life at different spatial scales.

At the microscale, how site design facilitates play and physical activity is examined by applying deep learning-based computer vision algorithms on a video recording of a public space. At the mesoscale, how neighborhood environment influences people’s life satisfaction through their sense of community is studied based on a face-to-face questionnaire survey and seemingly unrelated regression. At the macroscale, whether jobs-housing balance is related to the travel patterns for different occupation groups is scrutinized based on a travel characteristics survey and population census data, with the help of the Hidden Markov Mixture Model and the Variational Bayesian HEM algorithm.

Several important findings and policy implications are derived. At the microscale, people with “playful” trajectories are found to spend more time near movable or semi-fixed facilities. People with “sporty” and “playful” trajectories are also found to have higher physical activity levels. It is thus suggested that public space should be (re)designed to incorporate interactive facilities when appropriate to encourage more outdoor play and physical activity, in response to the global trend of obesity.

At the mesoscale, it is found that sense of community mediates the relationship between older people’s satisfaction with the neighborhood environment and their life satisfaction. Moreover, the place aspect of the sense of community has a larger influence than the people aspect of sense of community on people’s life satisfaction. Further, the percentage of out-of-home activity time spent in the common neighborhood is found to be associated with one’s sense of community. Therefore, limited public funding can be spent on the identified common neighborhoods to cultivate a higher sense of community and promote aging in place, which helps deal with the challenge of population aging.

At the macroscale, different occupation groups are found to have different travel patterns. Two lifestyle clusters, “balanced and compact activity space” and “work-oriented and extensive travels” are also identified. It is found that lower levels of jobs-housing balance are associated with “work-oriented and extensive travels” group. Several occupations in the quaternary industry are also found to have relatively lower levels of jobs-housing balance. The results suggest that improving jobs-housing balance can be used as an effective strategy to shorten commutes and mitigate climate change.

In so doing, this thesis makes conceptual and methodological contributions, as well as offers policy implications on how urban environment can be improved to enhance livability and sustainability in cities.