Spatial disparities of social and ecological infrastructures and their coupled relationships in cities

Abstract

Cities are social-ecological systems. Availability and accessibility to both social and ecological infrastructures are fundamentally important for quality of life and therefore sustainable city design. However, previous studies focused on the availability and accessibility to either social infrastructures such as hospitals and schools, or ecological infrastructures such as parks separately. Few studies examined their coupled relationship and how that relationship varies in space. Here, we mapped accessibility to social and ecological infrastructures simultaneously, and quantified their relationship along a gradient from old to newer urban areas with a social-ecological perspective in Beijing. We found large spatial variations in both accessibility to social and ecological infrastructures, showing that the accessibility to social infrastructures continuously decreased along the gradient, whereas that to ecological infrastructures had a U-shaped change. More importantly, we found that the proportion of residents with both high accessibility to the two types of infrastructures decreased by more than 19.82% along the gradient, while that of residents with both low accessibility had more than 7.78% and 44.11% increases in terms of coverage and services per capita, respectively. Our results provide a novel insight into how social and ecological accessibility changes in space and have practical implications for improving the service quality of the infrastructure system.