No abstract

Against the background of the aging trend in China, construction and regeneration strategies for an aging-friendly built environment are becoming common, led by urban governments, and public street spaces are the focus of these strategies. Exploring such planning and design strategies can help to improve the social welfare of the aging population and meet their diverse needs. Thus, this paper, through analyzing the determinants of the elderly’s needs, examines the relationship between spatial perception and street form, using Shanghai, in China, as a case study. This study contributes to the current literature in two ways: first, it constitutes the first attempt to build a needs hierarchy for aging people in a Chinese developed city; second, our statistical analysis involves large-scale population surveys, which helps us to comprehensively and deeply understand the impact of detailed street forms on the elderly’s various spatial perceptions. Our results indicate that the renovation of street space in different areas of cities can be improved by the control of street form, to meet the diverse needs of the local aging group.

The transfer of urban development goals from two-dimensional land to three-dimensional space leads to the dilemmas of the functional adjustment of partial space in the building, such as an unclear property right system, vague land financial expropriation method, uncertain economic value, etc. This study aims to understand land-development-right pricing based on spatial characteristics in spatial function regeneration. Especially, we deal with the following questions: (1) How do we identify the spatial development rights and their pricing? (2) How do we develop an effective method to evaluate the value of local spatial-oriented development rights? Answering these questions helps to establish a sustainable land finance mode, which enables the public and private sectors to share the rising value of the urban functional adjustment. Thus, employing mixed methods, the study analyzes the characteristics of property rights and the economic value of spatial-development rights. We find the following: (1) The main institutional obstacle restricting local regeneration is the inconsistency between the local spatial ownership and use right of land. (2) The technical shortcomings of land finance result from the lack of an evaluation method of the spatial characteristics. Our study motivates the transition of urban economics from a two-dimensional surface to three-dimensional spaces. Meanwhile, for countries with similar land property rights and leasing systems to China, the study also provides a useful reference to deal with the property right and land finance issues in the renewal of local spatial functions.