Nonlinear relationship between the urban form and street vitality : a data informed approach involving twelve Chinese cities

Han, Yun and Ye, Yu and Qin, Chunpeng; (2022) Nonlinear relationship between the urban form and street vitality : a data informed approach involving twelve Chinese cities. In: Annual Conference Proceedings of the XXVIII International Seminar on Urban Form. University of Strathclyde Publishing, Glasgow, pp. 371-380. ISBN 9781914241161

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Abstract

The relationship between the urban form and urban vitality has been widely discussed over the past few decades. Nevertheless, due to the limitation of available fine-scale urban data and analytical methods, previous empirical studies have mainly focused on mesoscale urban morphological characteristics within the scope of a single city, while microscale analyses among different cities are rare. In addition, most researchers adopt traditional linear or pre-defined regression models while ignoring the nonlinear effects of urban form characteristics. To address these two gaps, this study examines multi-source big data to measure multidimensional urban form characteristics from both the top-down and human-scale perspectives. Taking the streets of 12 Chinese city old districts as samples, this study uses a gradient promotion decision tree model to examine the irregular association between the urban form and street vitality. The explanations for the model indicate that: (1) Compared with the functional and human-scale morphological characteristics, the mesoscale morphological characteristics, especially the street intersection density, block size, street density, building density, and floor area ratio are dominant contributors to street vitality; (2) There is a nonlinear relationship between some urban morphological characteristics and street vitality and their associations change drastically past some thresholds of urban form attributes.

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https://doi.org/10.17868/strath.00080487
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