Measuring spatial accessibility of urban parks: A case study of Qingdao City, China

Urban parks are the important recreation site for citizens, viewed as basal green infrastructure and crucial amenities in urban areas, and usually perform important ecological and socio-economic functions. With socio-economic development, Chinese people and governments pay much more attention to urban green spaces, especially urban parks, and more and more citizens have the desire for contact with nature, and are willing to live and work close to urban parks. Consequently., governments plan to optimize urban parks allocation in order to meet citizens' increasing needs. Quantification of accessibility of urban parks is a prerequisite to appraise and allocate them with equity as a tool for decision-making in planning. In this paper, supported by Remote Sensing and GIS, the accessibility of urban parks based on high resolution data was analyzed with minimum nearest distance method at the house level and container method at block groups scale, through a case study of Qingdao city, China. The distances between houses (origins) and urban parks (destinations) are measured as the Euclidian (straight-line) distance. Four levels of access, very good, good, poor and very poor, were classified based on the distance between residence and the nearest urban park, and the area of urban park per capita. Results demonstrate that the spatial patterns of accessibility are consentaneous on the whole by using two different methods, for the spatial pattern is relation to the distribution of urban parks. However, the accurateness in results is quite different. The accessibility of urban parks acquired by the minimum nearest distance method is more accurate and appropriate than under the container method. The results calculated with the container measure show that 58.07 % of block groups have very poor or poor access level, which means the accessibility of urban parks is not good in Qingdao city as a whole. In addition, the spatial pattern of the accessibility is not equipoise. The southern and northeastern areas appear to have good access to urban parks. The results calculated with the minimum nearest distance method illustrate that 92.15 % of houses have very good or good access level, which means that the accessibility of urban parks is good in Qingdao city as a whole. The results also show that the distribution of urban parks has a comparatively high level of equity and fairness at house level, and the spatial pattern of the accessibility of urban parks based on the minimum nearest distance measure is much more equipoise than the one based on container measure.. Theses models from this paper can provide planners and policy-makers with substantial information that can be used in urban parks develop planning and assessment.