Street Usage Characteristics, Subjective Perception and Urban Form of Aging Group: A Case Study of Shanghai, China

Abstract

Against the background of the aging trend in China, construction and regeneration strategies for an aging-friendly built environment are becoming common, led by urban governments, and public street spaces are the focus of these strategies. Exploring such planning and design strategies can help to improve the social welfare of the aging population and meet their diverse needs. Thus, this paper, through analyzing the determinants of the elderly’s needs, examines the relationship between spatial perception and street form, using Shanghai, in China, as a case study. This study contributes to the current literature in two ways: first, it constitutes the first attempt to build a needs hierarchy for aging people in a Chinese developed city; second, our statistical analysis involves large-scale population surveys, which helps us to comprehensively and deeply understand the impact of detailed street forms on the elderly’s various spatial perceptions. Our results indicate that the renovation of street space in different areas of cities can be improved by the control of street form, to meet the diverse needs of the local aging group.