Street Usage Characteristics, Subjective Perception and Urban Form of Aging Group: A Case Study of Shanghai, China

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.

Aging-friendly cities: Investigating the effects of street usage on the psychological satisfaction of older adults in megacities

“…Shanghai was chosen as our case study ( Figure 3 ) because it provides a typical example of a world megacity that faces a serious aging issue ( Zhu et al, 2022 ). Shanghai consists of 16 districts, and we selected four typical streets, all located in districts with a high proportion of older people.…”

“…By the end of 2020, there were 53,349 million elderly people (aged 60 and above), accounting for 36.1% of the total residential population. The number of elderly people living alone was 305,200 ( Zhu et al, 2022 ). It is estimated that by 2035 and 2050, China’s elderly population (aged 65 and over) will reach 327 million and 393 million, respectively, accounting for 21.8 and 26.2% of the global elderly population ( Ren, 2022 ).…”

Citizen Perspective on the Development of Sustainability Indicators—A Case Study based on the West Bund, Shanghai

“…It reflects an ageing-oriented shift of the community benefits narrative of the participants in the context of an accelerated ageing society in Shanghai (Kim H.W. et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2022):…”