Regional Differences and Influential Factors of Open Public Space in Chinese Cities Based on Big Earth Data

Abstract

Urban open public spaces that provide multiple services for residents are essential for improving life quality and urban ecosystem function and promoting healthy development, the safety of human settlements and the sustainable development of urban cities. Based on Sustainable Development Goal 11.7 of the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda, this study combines the big earth data with the Theil index, a coefficient of variation and Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) to analyze the regional differences and spatial distribution of urban open public space in 2015 for China, and uses the geographical detector to identify key factors that affect the distribution of open public spaces. The results show that (1) open public space scales in provincial-level cities have an ‘East–Central–West’ low-lying land pattern in spatial distribution, where the eastern region has a relatively larger open public space scale. (2) In the prefecture-level cities, the open public space scale increases with an increase in city size and economic development level, and the differences in urban open public space reduce with an increase in city size and increase with a decrease in the economic development level. (3) Factors including economic development level, residents’ living standards, the urbanization level and the population size have sound explanatory powers in varying degrees on the scale of open public spaces; interactions between these factors have improved the explanatory power of the scale of urban open public space.

Innovative approaches to the Sustainable Development Goals using Big Earth Data

“…This product has helped to resolve a data deficiency in long-term urban expansion time-series datasets for 1,500 cities with populations greater than 300,000 in the Belt and Road region, produced from 1990 to 2015 at five-year intervals (Li, Cai, & Du, 2021). Case studies related to SDG 11.3.1 and 11.7.1 used Big Earth Data techniques and found that the expansion of urban built-up areas began to slow down after 2015 while open public space as a proportion of built-up areas in 342 prefectural cities increased by 1.5% on average (Wang, Huang, Feng, Zhao, & Gu, 2020c;Wang et al, 2020b). Public access to transportation was observed to have increased in approximately 80% of cities to varying degrees.…”