The livable urban landscape: GIS and remote sensing extracted land use assessment for urban livability in Changchun Proper, China

Assessing Community-Level Livability Using Combined Remote Sensing and Internet-Based Big Geospatial Data

“…For example, Zhang (2007) [9] summarized the potential factors that substantially impact livability, and classified them into five dimensions including safety, environmental health, living amenity, travel convenience, and environmental comfort. This five-dimensional framework has effectively guided the selection of indices, and then the design of an index system for livability assessment at both city and block levels [5,17,20,32]. Given the situations of our study area, assessment units, and data availability, we adopted this framework and selected indices from the dimensions of environmental health, environmental comfort, living amenity, and travel convenience at the top level (Table 1).…”

“…Beyond a safe and healthy living environment, a livable community should enable residents to enjoy a comfortable life to fulfill their high-level needs [9,15,34]. Factors about environmental comfort mainly include natural environmental conditions (e.g., topography, wildness), land use patterns (e.g., greenspace, building density, land use diversity), and accessibility to places for outdoor activities (e.g., parks, squares) [17,22,35]. Parks and squares can provide open spaces for walking, jogging, and cycling as well as recreation, so the accessibility to parks and squares affects residents' wellbeing in a specific community.…”

“…Living amenity reflects the extent to which public facilities provide convenient services to residents, and its close relationships with livability have been well-documented [9,14,34]. The facilities associated with living amenity often include shopping, education, healthcare, culture, entertainments, and so on [5,17,23]. How these public facilities influence residents' satisfaction and livability depends on how residents can get access to public facilities, or whether they have more choices to choose their services.…”

“…Moreover, the hierarchical structure of the model indexing system is helpful for organizing, understanding, and comparing the underlying influencing factors of livability at different stages of urban development [11,19,54]. Urban land use properties exert a strong influence on environmental health and comfort [17]. For example, industrial zones often have poor conditions of environmental comfort due to high heat emission and severe air pollution.…”

“…In contrast, at the middle level, livability assessments are made for spatial units within the city such as blocks, communities, and artificially delineated grids. It considers both local property information and environmental background on broader scales, which are able to truly reflect living environment of urban inhabitants [16][17][18]. Therefore, middle-level assessment (e.g., community-level) can provide detailed livability information that sufficiently supports urban planning and governance.…”