Abstract
Population aging has increasingly challenged socio-economic development worldwide, highlighting the significance of relevant research such as accessibility to residential care facilities (RCFs). However, a number of previous studies are carried out only on street (town)-to-district scales, which could cause errors of the accessibility to RCFs for a family. In order to improve the resolution to individual families, we measure and compare the accessibilities to RCFs based on 3494 residential communities and 169 streets of Guangzhou in 2020 through the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method. It was found that the distributions of the elderly and the service-dense blobs of the RCFs show patterns of a three-level spatial distribution, with a characteristic clustering at the center with peripheral dispersion. The resultant accessibility to RCFs in Guangzhou, ranging from 2.5 to 3.45, is generally consistent with the studies focusing on street scales. However, the maximum difference in the accessibility of two residential communities on the same street ranges from less than 0.02 to 0.94 in Guangzhou, indicating large variations. Although the relative errors of the accessibility results based on bi-scale data are relatively low, the cumulative errors can be high, e.g., over 25% in many streets of large cities. Consequently, hundreds of elderly persons per street can be adversely affected by those errors, with six streets over 1000. Therefore, this study focusing on the smaller-scale residential community data may provide more accurate reference to individual households. For the spatial allocation and optimal layout of Guangzhou and similar cities with population aging, we suggest maximizing RCFs in metropolises by taking full advantage of existing residential care facilities with necessary restructuring, improvements, and expansions on service capability. While for less connected cities, we encourage building new RCFs in situ.
Highlights
Population aging has become an increasingly prominent phenomenon in the world [1]
Based on the residential care facilities (RCFs) data, it was found that the spatial distribution of RCFs in Guangzhou had high variation (Figure 2)
A total of 115 streets include at least one residential care facility, which illustrated that the distribution of RCFs was relatively balanced in Guangzhou
Summary
Population aging has become an increasingly prominent phenomenon in the world [1] It brings significant challenges and impacts on many fronts of sustainable development [2,3]. The spatial accessibility to public services, such as residential care facilities, hospitals, health services, markets, parks, sport facilities, schools, and banks, is a critical issue in the field of public health, reasonable urban planning and sustainable development [6,7]. It has a significant impact on social equity and justice, especially for an aging society [8]. It could find that a number of studies have focused on measuring spatial accessibility to public services worldwide, including cities and other developing regions [9,10,11]
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