In response to the United Nations' call to build a sustainable and age‐friendly society, older adults' public health, normally measured by functional capacity, has been of increasing concern on a ...global scale. The built environment is closely intertwined with the functional capacity of older adults, as evidenced by extensive studies. However, most studies have focused on exploring linear relationships between the built environment and functional capability yet overlooking non‐linear relationships. This study aims to investigate non‐linear relationships between the built environment and older adults' functional capability. Therefore, this study conducted in 2018 adopts a generalized additive mixed model based on a sample of 1083 participants in a typical aging society of Hong Kong. The results discover improved functional capability among older adults who are younger, female, living with family members, with a longer care cycle and fewer comorbidities. The results also support non‐linear relationships between the built environment and older adults' functional capability. The optimal functional capability of older Hong Kong adults was found under a specific threshold of built environment factors, such as park density with a desirable number of 5 ± 2, intersection density with a maximal threshold of 200, the highest sky view percentage possibly, and land‐use diversity with a minimum threshold of 0.6 for entropy index. The study is of value for relevant stakeholders and policymakers to implement sustainable and age‐friendly urban planning for the built environment for facilitating older adults' public health.
•Contact with nature positively contributes to the health of people.•For the design of healthy cities, empirically substantiated metrics are required.•Type of nature, size, distance and quality are ...discussed.•Cumulative opportunities-based indicators of urban green space seem preferable.•For future research, more functionally oriented accessibility indicators are needed.
There is growing scientific recognition that contact with nature in general, and contact with urban green more specific, have the potential to positively contribute to human health. For the purpose of developing healthy urban neighbourhoods, this raises the question how to take scientific evidence about these health benefits into account. Accessibility metrics that are well substantiated by empirical evidence are needed. This paper reviews the quantitative and qualitative aspects relevant for accessibility metrics and empirical studies addressing these aspects in relation to health. Studies comparing different types of green space indicators suggest that cumulative opportunities indicators are more consistently positively related to health than residential proximity ones. In contrast to residential proximity indicators, cumulative opportunities indicators take all the green space within a certain distance into account. Comparing results across studies proved to be hard. Green space accessibility was measured in a variety of ways and the green space indicator that was chosen was often not problematized. We feel that it is time for a more function-oriented approach. How precisely does contact with nature impact health and what type and qualities are relevant in this regard? We think this will lead to a new generation of more evidence-based accessibility metrics that will help to advance the field.
•Street-level imagery became ingrained as an important urban data source.•Most comprehensive review on street view imagery in geospatial and urban studies.•We have screened 619 papers to identify the ...state of the art, focusing on applications.•250 studies are classified into 10 application domains and span dozens of use cases.
Street view imagery has rapidly ascended as an important data source for geospatial data collection and urban analytics, deriving insights and supporting informed decisions. Such surge has been mainly catalysed by the proliferation of large-scale imagery platforms, advances in computer vision and machine learning, and availability of computing resources. We screened more than 600 recent papers to provide a comprehensive systematic review of the state of the art of how street-level imagery is currently used in studies pertaining to the built environment. The main findings are that: (i) street view imagery is now clearly an entrenched component of urban analytics and GIScience; (ii) most of the research relies on data from Google Street View; and (iii) it is used across myriads of domains with numerous applications – ranging from analysing vegetation and transportation to health and socio-economic studies. A notable trend is crowdsourced street view imagery, facilitated by services such as Mapillary and KartaView, in some cases furthering geographical coverage and temporal granularity, at a permissive licence.
The article presents an analysis of the development of the Lviv tram network from the end of the XIXth century till nowadays and for the near future. The stages of construction of tram depots and ...development of tram lines in the context of the city territory servicing, their changes, and connection with the configuration of the city street network are shown. City planning approaches to further development of the tram network infrastructure are presented.
This review examines different ways that contact with nature can contribute to the health and well-being of children. Applying the capabilities approach to human development for a broad definition of ...well-being, it traces research from the 1970s to the present, following shifting research approaches that investigate different dimensions of health. A compelling body of evidence exists that trees and natural areas are essential elements of healthy communities for children. They need to be integrated at multiple scales, from landscaping around homes, schools, and childcare centers, to linked systems of urban trails, greenways, parks, and “rough ground” for children’s creative play.
•Urban green space promotes physical activity and public health.•Many US minority communities lack green space access, an environmental injustice.•US and Chinese cities have developed innovative ways ...to create new green space.•Urban greening can, however, create paradoxical effects such as gentrification.•Urban green space projects need more integrative sustainability policies to protect communities.
Urban green space, such as parks, forests, green roofs, streams, and community gardens, provides critical ecosystem services. Green space also promotes physical activity, psychological well-being, and the general public health of urban residents. This paper reviews the Anglo-American literature on urban green space, especially parks, and compares efforts to green US and Chinese cities. Most studies reveal that the distribution of such space often disproportionately benefits predominantly White and more affluent communities. Access to green space is therefore increasingly recognized as an environmental justice issue. Many US cities have implemented strategies to increase the supply of urban green space, especially in park-poor neighborhoods. Strategies include greening of remnant urban land and reuse of obsolete or underutilized transportation infrastructure. Similar strategies are being employed in Chinese cities where there is more state control of land supply but similar market incentives for urban greening. In both contexts, however, urban green space strategies may be paradoxical: while the creation of new green space to address environmental justice problems can make neighborhoods healthier and more esthetically attractive, it also can increase housing costs and property values. Ultimately, this can lead to gentrification and a displacement of the very residents the green space strategies were designed to benefit. Urban planners, designers, and ecologists, therefore, need to focus on urban green space strategies that are ‘just green enough’ and that explicitly protect social as well as ecological sustainability.
•Most publications reviewed fail to define what is meant by the term greenspace.•Of those that do provide a definition, six different definition types are identified.•Two broad interpretations are ...used: a) greenspace as synonomous with nature; and.•b) greenspace as explicitly urban vegetation.•Recommend a definition is required that is both qualitative and quantitative.
Greenspace research has been driven by an emerging interest in the impact that biodiversity and ecosystem function has on life in urban areas. Studies from multiple disciplines across the life, physical and social sciences investigate the interactions with or within greenspace, creating a wide range of potentially related, but disparate findings. In order to understand whether these unconnected findings might be integrated, it is important to be able to make comparisons and build meta-analyses. In a review of journal articles about greenspace, we found that less than half of the 125 journal articles reviewed defined what greenspace was in their study; although many articles implied a definition. In those that provided a definition, we identified two overarching interpretations of greenspace using six different definition types. Perhaps arising from how the term has been lexicalized, this suggests that researchers do not have the same understanding of greenspace and limits the ability of researchers to draw meaning from multiple contexts or create syntheses. Rather than suggest a single, prescriptive understanding of greenspace, we propose that researchers construct a definition of greenspace for the context of their research that utilises both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
Urban scholars have studied street networks in various ways, but there are data availability and consistency limitations to the current urban planning/street network analysis literature. To address ...these challenges, this article presents OSMnx, a new tool to make the collection of data and creation and analysis of street networks simple, consistent, automatable and sound from the perspectives of graph theory, transportation, and urban design. OSMnx contributes five significant capabilities for researchers and practitioners: first, the automated downloading of political boundaries and building footprints; second, the tailored and automated downloading and constructing of street network data from OpenStreetMap; third, the algorithmic correction of network topology; fourth, the ability to save street networks to disk as shapefiles, GraphML, or SVG files; and fifth, the ability to analyze street networks, including calculating routes, projecting and visualizing networks, and calculating metric and topological measures. These measures include those common in urban design and transportation studies, as well as advanced measures of the structure and topology of the network. Finally, this article presents a simple case study using OSMnx to construct and analyze street networks in Portland, Oregon.
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