As China’s urbanization shifts from scale expansion toward qualitative and fine-grained development, waterfront revetment zones in high-density urban areas increasingly require both the regeneration of existing spaces and ecological restoration. Traditional revetment engineering, however, typically prioritizes flood control and drainage at the expense of ecological integrity. Meanwhile, higher flood-protection standards have left some waterfront areas vacant or underused, intensifying the spatial tension between rigid safety constraints and multi-dimensional development needs. To address this challenge, this study integrates the principles of spatial equilibrium and marginal decision-making from public finance to develop a resilience-oriented, potential–value evaluation framework. The framework defines construction potential in terms of safety, ecological, and functional resilience, and construction value in terms of socioeconomic, historical and cultural, ecological and environmental, and public-service dimensions. Both construction potential and value are classified and overlaid using the analytic hierarchy process–entropy weighting method (AHP–EWM) and geographic information system (GIS) spatial overlay analysis. Applied to Fengqituo and Jiulongpo District in Chongqing, this study delineates three spatial suitability zones based on comparative advantages: highly suitable zones, moderately suitable zones, and recommended restoration zones. Accordingly, it proposes a development-guided and restoration-prioritized differentiated management pathway alongside water-level-responsive construction guidelines. The results indicate that the framework effectively quantifies the resilience supply capabilities and demand intensities of specific spatial units, thereby striking a dynamic balance between disaster prevention baselines and spatial efficiency. Ultimately, the framework translates macro-resilience concepts into operational spatial planning strategies, providing an analytical tool for the optimal allocation and fine-grained governance of waterfront resources in high-density urban settings.
Global warming has led to an increasing frequency of extreme heat events, worsening urban thermal environments. Precise regulation of urban spatial morphology is an effective approach to mitigating urban heat stress. The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) framework provides a robust framework for linking urban form with the urban thermal environment. Taking Xiamen as a case study, this research applied a convolutional neural network to generate a high-resolution LCZ map and selected 10 spatial morphological indices, including building density, floor area ratio, and greening ratio, to analyze their relationships with land surface temperature (LST). Correlation analysis, XGBoost, and SHAP were employed to investigate these relationships. The results reveal that: 1) impervious surface area, building density, floor area ratio, normalized difference built-up index, normalized difference vegetation index, and modified normalized difference water index exhibit the strongest correlations with LST across LCZs; 2) the XGBoost regression results indicate that the explanatory power of the 10 indices for LST varies across LCZs, ranging from 0.12 to 0.78; and 3) SHAP analysis provides a robust interpretation of the XGBoost results, with the interactions among the 10 indices broadly characterized by three patterns: threshold-amplification, nonlinear cooling, and diminishing returns. The results offer a scientific basis for refined urban planning and climate-adaptive design and contribute to enhancing urban climate resilience.
Against the backdrop of urban development shifting from urban expansion planning to the regeneration of existing urban areas, this study analyzes spatial equity disparities in public parks and their influencing factors from the perspective of urban spatial heterogeneity. Using 86 parks within five new towns in Shanghai, this study constructs an accessibility analysis framework based on an improved Gaussian two-step floating catchment area (G2SFCA) method. This framework evaluates the spatial equity characteristics of public parks at different urban scales and explores associations between residential and subdistrict attributes and spatial equity. The findings reveal that: 1) Spatial equity in public parks exhibits overall characteristics of "functional unit differentiation, " "scale differentiation, " and "income differentiation." Accessibility to community parks is most significantly influenced by human activity density, while accessibility to pocket parks is closely correlated with socioeconomic status. 2) The planning logic of "prioritizing production over living" in new town industrial zones, path dependencies in old district regeneration, and the overall forward-looking layout of newly developed areas collectively shape differentiated access opportunities to public parks. Their spatial resources undergo redistribution under the influence of new town planning supply logic and housing market differentiation. 3) Future strategies should enhance targeted park supply across diverse functional zones, balance access to park types for different income groups through planning measures, and optimize layouts by establishing multi-tiered park service systems. This research provides methods and strategies for studying differentiated park equity and planning responses within heterogeneous urban spaces.
Globalization connects cultures and economies, influencing urban structures, land use, and building functions. It has influenced the Arab world's transformation under globalized development, but the state of the art on urban typo-morphology in the Middle East remains inadequate. This paper explores changing typo-morphological characteristics under globalization through the cases of Amman and Irbid. It analyzes building use typologies for 1953, 1981, 2000, and 2024 using satellite images, interviews, and GIS-based spatial analysis across three spatial scales—city, zone, and plot. To enhance our results, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to quantify and rank factors influencing typo-morphology changes. The results show that Jordan experienced three stages of globalization: pre-globalization (1930s–1950s), early globalization (1960s–1980s), and fast globalization (1980s–present). Six key factors have driven typo-morphology changes under globalization: successive migrations; the 2000–2008 economic boom; refugee camp evolution; Middle East wars; technological development; and the 2009 global economic crisis. The first three are the key drivers for Amman and Irbid's morphological evolution. These findings demonstrate how economic and social forces shape urban form over seven decades. Typo-morphology serves as an effective analytical approach for understanding globalization's impact on city evolution. This approach, integrating the GIS–AHP framework, introduces a quantifiable dimension to urban typo-morphological analysis, providing a novel framework for examining globalization's spatial impacts in Middle Eastern cities.
With the rapid growth of social media, digital and physical spaces are increasingly connected. Public perceptions of creative industry parks now provide an important basis for assessing the appeal of urban spaces for cultural innovation. Previous studies have examined evaluations on social media, but few have systematically identified sentiment patterns and the issues that concern visitors most. This study examined 37 representative creative industry parks (CIPs) in Shanghai using 68,826 user comments from Dianping. It developed a quantitative framework of digital presence assessment, sentiment analysis, and topic identification. Senta was used for sentiment analysis and BERTopic for topic modeling to examine public perception across digital and physical settings. The results show that: 1) CIPs differ clearly in online visibility, and highly visible parks can accumulate reviews quickly through a cycle of visits, online comments, and further sharing; 2) public sentiment is predominantly positive, with positive comments accounting for about 85% and a mean sentiment score of 0.83, while arts-oriented and leisure-and-entertainment CIPs exhibit higher scores; and 3) the model identified 28 topics, among which children’s recreation, transportation accessibility, and historical culture occur most frequently. Convenient transportation, child-friendly environments, art exhibitions, and historical architectural characteristics constitute the core themes of positive perceptions, whereas operational issues related to management, services, and hygiene are the primary themes associated with negative evaluations. These findings show that a CIP’s reputation depends on both the appeal of its online place image and the quality and consistency of the on-site experience. The study therefore proposes spatial strategies that build on positively perceived, shareable features and address recurring problems in transport connections, facilities, and services. The findings support urban regeneration and targeted governance of creative industry parks from a digital–physical perspective.
Against the backdrop of China's "Park City" agenda and tightening municipal budgets, large urban parks face a persistent valuation and financing challenge because many of their ecological and social benefits and spatial externalities are not fully captured by conventional fiscal accounting or internalized by the entities responsible for park investment. This study proposed a context-adapted Social Return on Investment (SROI) framework that integrates selected ecological, social, direct economic, and property-related outcomes within a unified monetary accounting system, and applied it in the case of Biyun Green Space in Shanghai. The findings reveal that: 1) Under the selected accounting assumptions, the park yields a first-year SROI of 0.97 and a five-year SROI of 1.14. This means every RMB 1 invested corresponds to approximately RMB 0.97 and RMB 1.14 in adjusted monetized value over one and five years, respectively. 2) The monetized value distribution is highly uneven with property-related value accounting for 89.81% of the first-year total, followed by ecological value (5.87%), social value (2.21%), and direct economic value (2.11%). 3) Scenario analysis shows that the calculated SROI is strongly affected by the inclusion and potential internalization of property-related spatial externalities, indicating that coordinated park-property development may provide a context-specific value-capture pathway under particular institutional conditions. 4) One-at-a-Time Sensitivity Analysis shows that short-term investment performance is primarily constrained by total input, while longer-term performance increasingly depends on the accumulation of recurring ecological, social, and direct economic benefits, suggesting that capital efficiency is particularly important in the early investment stage, whereas sustaining recurring benefits becomes increasingly important over the longer evaluation horizon.
This study provides a context-specific empirical application of SROI for large urban park valuation. The findings highlight the need to balance early-stage capital efficiency with the long-term retention of recurring public benefits, while using context-appropriate mechanisms to internalize park-related spatial externalities.
Urban green space zero-waste design faces challenges such as insufficient lifecycle waste reduction, inefficient interdisciplinary knowledge integration, disconnection between site data and design decision-making, and over-reliance on individual experience in design schemes. Traditional experience-driven design models are increasingly inadequate to support the demands for refined and intelligent transformation. To address these issues, this study proposes a Perception–Knowledge–Decision-Making framework driven by multi-source sensing data for the zero-waste design of urban green spaces. The framework collects multidimensional site data through drone imaging sensors, environmental sensors, and laser scanning technology. The study constructs a knowledge graph that semantically links four core entities: strategy, performance, case, and industrial-chain information. Stored in the Neo4j graph database, it enables dynamic knowledge association and efficient retrieval. An intelligent auxiliary decision-making tool is developed by combining knowledge graph-enhanced retrieval and intelligent agent technologies, thereby improving the capabilities for identifying, reasoning, and matching strategies for complex design problems. A simulation-based case study at a community garden in Shanghai was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework, revealing its potential to improve waste resource utilization matching, design efficiency, and resource utilization effectiveness. This study presents a proof-of-concept framework and provides a theoretical pathway and methodological exploration for sustainable landscape design supported by cutting-edge sensing technologies.
Biodiversity is a key evaluation criterion of natural environments, and its positive effects on human health are well-documented. Some recent studies suggest that biodiversity perception (BP) may play a crucial role in explaining the relationship between biodiversity and health. This study introduces the "Environment–Psychology–Perception–Benefit" theoretical framework, grounded in audio–visual integration, to investigate how BP influences both physical and mental health. A total of 380 participants were recruited for this research. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to examine how nature relatedness, nature attitude, and nature cognition impact BP through psychological identification (PI). Pearson's correlation analysis was also conducted to explore the relationships between BP, actual biodiversity, and environmental perception factors. Additionally, the recovery benefits of different levels of BP on physiological indices were evaluated through controlled experimental conditions. The results show that nature attitude is significantly positively correlated with BP, and nature relatedness positively influences BP via PI; BP notably enhances psychological recovery, attention, and stress reduction; Medium BP environments provide the highest levels of relaxation and recovery, while high BP environments significantly enhance attention restoration. This study offers an in-depth exploration of the mechanisms and benefits of BP, advancing the theoretical understanding of BP and offering foundational support for biodiversity conservation, utilization, and nature-based therapeutic practices.
As biocultural diversity (BCD) research has expanded into urban contexts, greater attention has been paid to everyday green spaces, including parks and community gardens, and to the roles of residents, planners, and managers. Yet the research trajectories behind this expansion and the conceptual framing of urban biocultural diversity (UBCD) remain insufficiently synthesized. Drawing on 1, 180 BCD-related publications and 71 urban-focused publications retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection, this review combines bibliometric analyses using HistCite and CiteSpace with close readings of representative studies. The findings indicate that the extension of BCD research into cities involves more than a change of setting. Research has broadened to consider new places and actors, bringing everyday experiences, values, participation and long-term stewardship into sharper focus. Rather than treating biological and cultural diversity as additive, UBCD foregrounds the diverse and changing relationships through which people live with and shape urban nature. The materialized–lived–stewardship framework provides a structure for examining these relationships. For community green space improvement, this perspective calls for attention to ecological and spatial conditions, existing uses, participation, and long-term stewardship. Decisions about what to retain, modify or introduce should also consider how improvement may sustain, alter or reshape established human–nature relationships.
Extreme weather and climate events have emerged as major challenges to the sustainable development of human society. Stormwater management in Chinese cities faces complex, systemic challenges. Using the conversion of underutilized campus space into a teaching and training site as a case study, this paper explores approaches to building pluvial resilience featuring dual-use for both normal and emergency situations within built environments. First, functional zoning of the site follows the principles of spatial openness and functional sharing. Mutual benefits for stakeholders foster a stable, collaborative social network for site operation and maintenance, which guarantees the long-term effectiveness of stormwater management. Second, the volumetric method sizes retention spaces for routine rainfall, and coordinated site grading creates temporary detention spaces for emergency rainfall, with their combination forming dual-use stormwater storage. Finally, at the runoff convergence outlet, the design accommodates transitions between normal and emergency rainfall conditions without a fixed operational threshold. Automatic delayed outflow without manual intervention ensures reliable and safe temporary rainwater storage and emergency overflow. Having operated for 41 months, the site has experienced 402 rainfall events of different intensities and achieved favorable pluvial flood control outcomes. Based on the renovation of existing campus space, this study establishes a model of dual-use pluvial resilience, offering a practical example for stormwater management and multifunctional use within the urban built environment.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered global lockdowns, imposing stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces, altering acoustic environments and influencing human wellbeing. This research systematically examines changes in the acoustic environment during this period and their implications for human health. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, 182 studies published between 2020 and 2025 were retrieved from the Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library databases. Results revealed a significant difference between cities included in the Global Cities Index (−5.8 dBA) and other cities (−13.8 dBA). Across sound source categories, urban, anthropogenic, and aircraft noise showed mean changes of −10.1 dBA, −10.7 dBA, and −11.2 dBA, respectively. In contrast, certain functional indoor environments exhibited increases in sound levels, particularly medical spaces (+5.3 dBA). Research attention also increasingly shifted to indoor soundscapes. Compared with the pre-restriction period (2014–2019), studies on indoor soundscapes increased to 3.53 times, while studies on outdoor soundscapes increased to 2.97 times during 2020–2025. The research focus evolved from objective acoustic measurements to perception and health-related outcomes. Indoor noise exposure in home-based working and learning environments was associated with reduced comfort, decreased cognitive performance, and increased annoyance, whereas natural sounds or music were linked to improved psychological well-being and restorative experiences. Objective acoustic measurements, sound-source characteristics, contextual factors, subjective soundscape evaluations, and health-related outcomes should be considered together to understand the relationships between acoustic environments and human experience, well-being, and health.