Walkability Assessment in a Rapidly Urbanizing City and Its Relationship with Residential Estate Value

Jingyuan Zhang,Hui Zeng,Ye Zhang,Puay Yok Tan

doi:10.3390/su11082205

Jingyuan Zhang, Hui Zeng + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su11082205

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Abstract

Walkability has increasingly been recognized as an important factor for sustainable urban development that, however, has seldom been investigated in rapid urbanizing cities, especially in the Asian context. This paper assessed walkability in Futian District in the central area of Shenzhen, which has undergone very rapid urbanization within a short period of time. Walkability was assessed for 2013 and 2018 using a walkability index adapted from Walk Score. It was compared with housing prices of 215 randomly selected residential buildings, to further explore the relationships between walkability and residential estate value, provided as one practical application of the assessment of walkability in urban management. Our results show that Futian District has low walkability level, although walkability has been generally improved from 2013 to 2018. A high spatial variation of walkability level within this area was observed in both years. Overall, there was a negative relationship between walkability and housing prices (significant only in 2018), which is inconsistent with studies elsewhere. The results suggest that the housing prices in Futian District are more strongly influenced by other factors rather than by walkability. In addition, the ability of the walkability model to explicitly delineate spatial variation of walkability level makes it a powerful tool to be applied in urban planning and management. Results of this study also have practical applications, which can be used as a reference for residents’ home selection and enable them to make informed decisions in selecting walkable neighborhoods with acceptable prices.

Highlights

Walking within the city has been overlooked, undervalued, or not adequately recognized as an important mode of movement with the appearance of car and development of high-speed road transport since the 1920s [1,2,3]
It is noticed that the north-western area of Futian District (Meilin subzone) is largely undeveloped, with abundant nature resources but few public facilities, which inevitably resulted in very low walkability level
If we only focus on the walkability level in built environment and exclude green spaces and waterbodies, the mean value improved from 23.21 (2013) to 30.16 (2018)

Summary

Introduction

Walking within the city has been overlooked, undervalued, or not adequately recognized as an important mode of movement with the appearance of car and development of high-speed road transport since the 1920s [1,2,3]. Promoting walkability has become the main focus of environmental and policy initiatives in a number of cities in recent decades [5,7,8,9], which is not surprising as walking plays an important and unique role in an efficient transport system [1,3]. It provides benefits in mobility, physical activity, psychological pleasure, health, social connection, recreation, environment protection, energy conservation, etc. Walkable cities have been advocated, and walkability has been treated as the foundation of a sustainable and livable city [6,10]

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