Landscape Architecture Frontiers

Urban greenways play a key role to a city’s nonautomobile commuting and help alleviate traffic congestion. Currently, China’s greenway planning research and practice focuses mostly on suburban areas where greenways provide ecological, historical, cultural, and recreational services, while fewer studies explore urban greenways that serve citizens’ daily non-automobile commuting and recreational needs. Compared with suburban ones, urban greenways often face more spatial limits in the built-up areas and need to respond to more challenging demands. Supported by multisource data and the rise of big data technologies, this research explores the methods of urban greenway route planning that are underpinned through GIS spatial analyses (potential evaluation on spatial construction conditions of greenways) and big-data-based user behavior analyses (of citizens’ daily use of greenways). Demonstrating the authentic planning case for Haidian District, Beijing, the research proposes a series of construction strategies to urban corridors of roads, waterways, and railways, respectively, which integrate green spaces with non-automobile system, in order to improve the services of linear spaces in cities.