Evaluating the human use efficiency of urban built environment and their coordinated development in a spatially refined manner

Abstract

Urban sustainability requires a coordinated development between urban built environment and human activities in cities. The irrational allocation of built environment stocks such as buildings and roads has led to urban problems like urban villages and ghost cities. However, the human use efficiency of urban built environment within cities and their coordinated development at a high spatial resolution remain hitherto poorly understood. Here, we aim to address this knowledge gap by leveraging the coupling coordination degree (CCD) method and emerging geospatial big data. We develop a framework that considers intra-city heterogeneity to achieve high-resolution mapping of the CCD between built environment and human activity at a grid level of 250m*250m for a case of Beijing, China. Our results show that the CCD of urban built environment and human activity in Beijing has a significant spatial correlation with a global Morans I of 0.716 and the two subsystems are well coupled in most areas. While the built environment subsystem lags in some old urban areas and commercial districts in the city center, human activity lags slightly in areas such as factories at the edge of the city. We suggest such methods could be extended to other cities to inform urban spatial planning and infrastructure development and maximize the human use efficiency of urban built environment in different cities and at different stages of urban development.