Virtual Only | Track 1 | Session 3. Healthy Neighbourhood and Housing

Rapid urbanisation is imposing challenges of various magnitudes on cities to meet the demands of their growing population. As described by M.R.G. Conzen, every city goes through several stages of development, reaches a point of stagnation and subsequently begins to decline leading to urban blight and decay. The unprecedented urban growth has resulted in socio-spatial problems apart from economic and environmental issues that are often evident in the deteriorating physical form of cities. This growing pressure on the spatial environment and urban infrastructure due to population expansion has significantly reduced the urban quality of life. There is a pressing need to develop more robust empirical solutions that will give a holistic insight into the factors that influence urban decline and residents’ quality of life and the interrelationship between them. There often exists a gap in policy interventions as there is a lack of place-based spatio-temporal assessment of underlying factors that govern the urban dynamics in developing nations. Therefore, this research outlines a place-based index for empirically analysing the socio-spatial causes of urban decline and their associated impact on residents’ quality of life. The study area for this research is Guwahati, which is a million-plus city in the North-Eastern part of India. This waterfront city has consistently fared poorly in the Government of India’s Ease of Liveability Index. Thus, it is imperative to understand the driving factors behind this phenomenon as the city faces a myriad of socio-economic, cultural and environmental issues. Reconnaissance surveys, focus group discussions and expert opinion surveys were conducted and cognitive mapping techniques were used to identify the underlying socio-spatial factors contributing to urban decline and poor residents’ quality of life. Confirmatory factor analysis was then conducted to define the variability among the identified factors and the underlying pattern of their association. The research findings highlight that urban infrastructure, environmental conditions, availability of open public spaces and neighbourhood attributes like integrated and safe street network, mixed land-use, moderate density and compact urban forms with walkable neighbourhoods are the tangible spatial factors that are significant determinants of urban decline and quality of life. Whereas, income level, employment opportunities, access to safe and affordable housing, and access to services like health and education are the social factors that have a direct impact on urban decline and quality of life. The intangible social factors like sense of security, sense of belonging, community engagement, culture and identity have lower significance in determining quality of life as compared to the tangible factors. The neighbourhoods that have come up in the last three decades have displayed considerably better resident satisfaction with respect to their quality of life and show minimal signs of urban decline while the satisfaction of residents in the traditional neighbourhood is comparatively less. Finally, based on the research findings, a place-based policy intervention has been proposed for building stronger communities and uplifting the quality of life in traditional neighbourhoods of Guwahati.

At the Fifth Plenary Session of the Nineteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, it was clearly proposed to implement an urban regeneration action to promote high-quality urban development. Strengthening the transformation of older neighborhoods in cities and towns is one of the main objectives and tasks of this action. As a major livelihood project and development project, the regeneration and transformation of older neighborhoods not only need to deal with the improvement and transformation of the physical space environment, but also face the profound contradictions brought about by the complex social structure. In the process of high-speed and large-scale urban construction, a large number of older neighborhoods that need to be regenerated have emerged in the existing residential environment. At the same time, the social age structure of many residents in older neighborhoods also shows distinct characteristics of aging. This kind of "double aging" residential area, which is accompanied by the aging of residents in the aging process of the physical environment, has gradually become an important type faced by the regeneration of older neighborhoods. At the same time, older neighborhoods where elderly groups live together are also the main space carrier for the development of home-based care service in China. However, compared with the development and construction of large-scale aging communities, studies on improving the quality of life of the elderly through neighborhood regeneration methods show problems and shortcomings in practice. In addition, under the background that domestic and foreign pension policies are aimed at promoting active ageing which is about promoting the elderly to maintain social connections, participating in economic activities and social affairs, and attaching importance to mental health, how to implement "double aging" neighborhoods regeneration under the framework of active ageing to achieve the goals of promoting the elderly to maintain an active, vital and healthy life in the community and extending the time from old age to disability as much as possible is a research question that needs to be expanded. This thesis uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to construct a multi-scale research framework from macro to micro. At the macro level, it uses big data collection to quantify the scale of the older neighborhoods built before the end of 2000 in Beijing’s central urban area (except the green area), and to analyze the double aging development situation. The paper constructed a neighborhood’s physical space environment measurement index system to screen out residential areas located in heavily aging areas to improve the accuracy of classification and implementation of the regeneration of older neighborhoods. At the micro level, the first is to summarize the "EPA-S" model (E-environmental supports, P-personal abilities, A- activity behaviors, S-active life state) under the two main lines of literature review of neighborhood regeneration and active ageing. The model is to describe the main dimensions and content involved in the practice of active ageing. Then, based on the model, sample data was collected in four types of older neighborhoods in Beijing through the design of the survey content to perform multi-layer linear regression analysis to verify the reliability of the model and the correlation between the indicators. Finally, through the activity path analysis method and relevant stakeholder interviews, the paper further analyzes the problems of physical space in supporting the active life behaviors of the elderly and the reasons that promote and hinder these problems from being resolved. By combining the domestic and foreign case analysis and practical transformation examples, it proposes strategies and policy mechanisms for regeneration of double aging neighborhoods under the framework of active ageing.

From the end of 2019 to the present, the global scale of the COVID-19, the long-term nature of time, and the uncertainty of development have all made it the main reason that affects residents' travel activities. Especially during the closure period of the epidemic, residents' travel activities were restricted, and the flow of people and residents' emotional perception in urban hotspots were different from the normalization period. In this paper, by crawling the text data of Weibo check-in in the main urban area of Harbin in three different periods before the outbreak, during the epidemic closure period and in the early stage of unblocking, using deep learning methods, based on Baidu PaddleHub-ERNIE fine-tuning Chinese sentiment analysis model to identify residents' emotions Polarity and mood type, compare and study the characteristics of changes in people flow and residents' emotions in the main urban hotspot space in the three time periods, focusing on the changes of various indicators in the nine major commercial districts in the main urban area. The study found that the flow of people and residents’ emotions in hot spots in the main urban area in the early stage of the epidemic had a tendency to rebound in revenge. Physical communication places are conducive to the generation of positive emotions. Therefore, we pay attention to residents’ mental health and grasp the physical space where face-to-face communication is possible. Whether it is still important to people, and exploring the development context of the real economy and virtual economy provide some thoughts and inspirations.

As an emerging rural planning research topic and a new direction of rural revitalization, rural resilience is of great significance for exploring the path of sustainable rural development and solving the instability and vulnerability of rural areas. Under the background of rapid urbanization, the single development model of traditional Chinese villages cannot support the self-renovation of villages, resulting in the lack of sufficient resilience of their social, economic and ecological systems, and the problems they face are prominent and urgent. The civil air defense plan selects the countryside as an evacuation base, which can connect urban and rural transportation, improve rural infrastructure, and drive rural economy. These aspects are a positive manifestation of urban and rural resilience. In order to improve rural resilience, this paper takes Zhanghai Town, a traditional Chinese town with a long history and beautiful environment, as the research object, and discusses the synergistic relationship between rural and civil air defense construction. Based on resilience theory, through the civil air defense planning practice modeled by ArcGIS, a rural resilience improvement framework is constructed from the perspective of civil air defense, and the connotation of rural resilience improvement is proposed as "guarantee improvement" of engineering resilience + "active adaptation" of evolution resilience. Among them, engineering resilience includes resource resilience guarantee and spatial resilience activation, and evolution resilience includes governance resilience and village resilience, which together constitute a rural social and ecological resilience network. The results prove that civil air defense planning is closely related to urban and rural areas, and is suitable for planning methods for the frequent occurrence of natural disasters and health incidents in urban and rural areas, making agricultural and rural areas more "resilient".

In the context of China's rapid urban regeneration and human and territorial changes, changes in the built environment have led to a reconfiguration of the social space of the community, alienation of neighbourhoods and increasing social health problems of residents.The key issue for policy makers and planners is how to develop community built environment improvement strategies that proactively intervene in social health, and the heart of problem-solving is clarifying the relationship between environment and social health.Therefore, this paper reviews and summarises the domestic and international research on related topics, constructs an "environment-social health" influence mechanism using objective behaviour and subjective perception as mediating variables, compares the widely used indicators and data sources for evaluating the built environment and residents' social health, classifies and analyses the research findings, and provides an outlook on the frontier issues in the academic field in the light of China's It also presents a perspective on the frontier issues in the academic field, with a view to providing theoretical support and practical guidance for the planning and construction of healthy communities.

The urban development have been hindered by the scarce developable space in many Chinese cities which are experiencing a transformation from planning for growth to planning for renewal. To better address the increasing demands of the people in public service, the national government has issued a series of policy promoting people-centric development by which local municipal governments are navigated. Wuhan is one of the cases in point. It has been renovating the old residential areas where most buildings were built prior to 2000. However, the improvement of amenities were criticized for mismatching the demands of the residents. Focusing on residents and neighborhood facilities, this research aims at investigating the challenges facing urban renewal in Wuhan considering people-centric development. By collected over 5000 questionnaires from 34 neighborhoods in Wuhan, the research adopted quantitative and qualitative mixed methods to investigate the relationships between residents’ satisfaction and public facilities. Three major findings were obtained. First, the conflict between public space and parking under the circumstance of scarce space. It would be hard to increase more space in dense developed urban area, but it is possible to increase the accessibility and to encourage the residents to choose green ways to travel. Second, social equity is the part that the current people-centric urban renewal can promote. The statistic results show that vulnerable groups, including elderly people, women, children, and low-income residents, highly rely on public facilities on neighborhood service. However, their space usually are invaded by other groups or are not adequately provided. Third, the actions taken by urban renewal involve a plenty of departments of the government. Although this mechanism leads to experts doing well in their fields, the collaborations and public participation become a hard task since it requires a trade-off between numbers of various voices. Based on the findings, the research recommends to improve the amenities based on 15 minutes life unit when executing the renovation projects in old residential areas. Besides, the local governments should break down its municipal plan of urban renewal into action plan at neighborhood level. The ‘Community Planner Institution’ can be an effective way to help bridging the governmental plan and residential demand.

Abstract: The rundown of neighborhoods environment quality will make negative influence on the congruence between environment situations and resident needs/aspirations. In the 1980s and 1990s, in order to solved the housing shortage of employees of industrial enterprises, the Chinese government and state enterprises developed many new residential areas. However, in the past twenty years, the lack of maintenance and renovation in residential areas of industrial base has led to the problems such as dilapidated buildings and public service facilities, chaotic traffic system and insufficient space for public activities. Although the Chinese government has formulated a series of policies to improve residents' life quality, the government-led renovate of residential areas often fails to accurately understand the main problems that residents want to solve. Therefore, it is necessary for policy makers to relize the influencing factors of residents' environmental satisfaction in old industrial bases, and make best use of the limited resources to maximize the well-being of cities and residents. Previous studies have examined neighborhood satisfaction and its influencing factors (Lovejoy et al., 2010; Liu,2010; Lv et al, 2019), with a common assumption, environmental factors have linear influence on satisfaction. However, this assumption may ignore the potential nonlinear relationship between environmental factors and satisfaction. This study tries to fill the gap. We surveyed the residents who living in the old residential area of Xiangfang Old Industrial Base in Harbin, China, and obtained 433 questionnaires of residents' environmental satisfaction. The method of an integration of gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT) and impact-asymmetry analysis (IAA) was used to analyze the impact of environmental attributes on neighborhood satisfaction. GBDT is a tree-based ensemble method, which explains the prediction error iteratively, approaches the true value, and minimizes a loss function until the loss function remains stable or reaches a minimum. It doesn’t require data to follow normally distributed, and is suitable for analyzing linear and nonlinear relationships. IAA is based on the three-factor theory and penalty-reward contrast analysis (PRC), combined with GBDT, using the thresholds of asymmetric impact index and performance, environmental attributes were classified and optimization strategies were proposed. The results show that: (1) As for residents’ satisfaction in old industrial bases, the space area of squares and small gardens, and the quality of rest space in green environment, are the most important environmental attributes. (2) In terms of strategies for environmental renovation, ensure travel safety, improve the accessibility of leisure space, add electronic monitoring for neighborhoods, promote quality of leisure spaces, and provide various leisure activities, which may significantly improve residential satisfaction. (3) There are the asymmetric relationships between neighborhood environment and residential satisfaction. There are three highlights in our study. Firstly, it adopts a mixed method to review the satisfaction of residence. In particular, GBDT is used to quantify the relative influences of various environmental attributes on neighborhood satisfaction. which is rare in this field. Secondly, compared with the traditional regression model, this study relaxed the linear hypothesis of the relationship between environment and residential satisfaction, and provides evidence for the non-linear relationship between them. Thirdly, the asymmetric relationships obtained by IAA implied the importance hierarchy of residential satisfaction, which could help planners to set priorities and goals for renovation. With the renovation of residential areas in old industrial bases becoming a national strategy to improve residents' well-being, it is essential to understand and analyze residential satisfaction with neighborhood environment. This study fills the gaps by clarifying the non-linear relationship between neighborhood environment and residential satisfaction in the old residential areas of industrial base, which provides enlightenments for the renovation of residential areas.