Citizens’ preferences and attitudes towards urban waterfront spaces: a case study of Qiantang riverside development

Abstract

Many cities are facing various environmental problems, where performance-based planning and nature-based solutions have been proposed to address such problems. As a natural landscape in the city, urban waterfront space has efficient ecological benefits, highquality landscape vision and environment, and it is an important carrier of citizens' activities. However, existing studies have mainly focused on coping with environmental problems, while social functions and strategies have been neglected. Therefore, this study aims to fill such research gaps by understanding the social performance of urban waterfront spaces. Field observation and questionnaire survey were conducted in a famous urban waterfront space, Qiantang riverside walkway, in Hangzhou, China. The results indicate that the Qiantang riverside walkway serves as a space for tourism, leisure and entertainment, as the visitors who lived more than 5 km away from here accounted for about 50% and the local people also accounted for about 50%. People's activities exhibited significantly temporal differences, where the occupation of the Qiantang riverside walkway reached a peak at night. For the people who lived far from here, they mainly depended on self-driving, which led to two critical problems relevant to transport linkage with the city and parking lot. Results also indicate that the landscape, supporting facilities and road functions could perform well among the mind of 102 respondents. However, public service and main facilities should be improved to meet more people's requirements. Moreover, importantly, the results indicate the phenomenon of stratification and agglomeration so that the similar aspects (e.g. rest seat quantity, rest seat style) could be merged into the same cluster (e.g. rest seat) for consideration in the urban waterfront space planning and design. This study also generates some implications for the renovation of urban waterfront spaces. Overall, this study provides people with basic understanding of the social performance of existing urban waterfront spaces, which can further promote urban planners and designers to comprehensively build sustainable, resilient and healthy water-based living environments.

Research progress and prospect of urban waterfront redevelopment

“…城市滨水空间作为城市中的一种自然景观， 具 有高效的生态效益、 高质量的景观视觉， 是公民活 动的重要载体 [61] 。在当前快速城市化的趋势下， 滨 水区通过创造休闲娱乐、 健康有益的空间， 对城市 生活具有重要意义 [62] ， 在开放的公共空间以及当代 城市经济发展之间保持平衡是滨水区再开发任务 之一 [63] 。自 20 世纪 90 年代以来， 人们对休闲和旅 游相关活动的需求持续强劲增长 [27] ， 滨水区逐渐成 为了人们的开放空间和娱乐场所 [62] 。多处滨水区 愿景宣言不仅旨在促进公众进入临港区， 还旨在通 过改善环境和外观， 为居民和游客提供步行通道和 零售、 休闲、 娱乐活动等 [32] ， 包括比赛、 文化节、 音乐 会、 展览等节目 [64] 。公共开放空间的形式成为振兴 滨水地区的必要组成部分 [65] 。…”

Urban sustainability as a social function of the city: Strategic correlation based on Brazilian legislation with the new urban agenda and sustainable development goals

“…Residents usually have more activities at night. This requires more investments related to transportation and parking lots to promote sustainable-living environments for both types of users: tourists and residents (Wang et al, 2020).…”

Behavioural mapping and online data as tools for socio-spatial analysis of public spaces – Bratislava, Slovakia waterfront case study

“…Researchers use human behaviour observation as a research method in many studies of public spaces. To study waterfront areas as places of public life, scientists and scientific teams often address the topic of waterfront elements in relationship to sustainability pillars (Apriliani & Dewi 2019) or identity (Lacilla 2016), the topic of the social life of public spaces on waterfronts to understand the human interactions (Andini 2011;Wang et al 2020), or the effect of waterfront development projects on the waterfront itself (Azlina & Abdul Jalil 2016). As an example from Slovakia, the Section of Urban Studies and Participation at the Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava, has used the method of mapping people's movement and behaviour in several of its projects.…”