A GIS-based spatial analysis of housing price and road density in proximity to urban lakes in Wuhan City, China

As one of the essential urban open spaces, lakes usually contribute immensely to the quality of residents' daily lives. Different from hedonic approach employed in existing researches on urban open spaces in China, this paper integrates housing price surface with road density to analyze the spatial characteristics in proximity to urban lakes in Wuhan City, China. With the expansion of Wuhan City, urban lakes became polluted, they shrunk or even disappeared, leading to unfavorable conditions for sustainable development of the city. To better understand the spatial relationship between the city and lakes, we classify the urban lakes in Wuhan central area into 'lakes in the urban center' and 'lakes in urban fringe'. Based on housing price surface we explore the spatial characteristics in proximity to different lakes and differences between the lakes. We also use Geographic Information System (GIS) tool to calculate road density as a supplementary indicator to reflect the accessibility in proximity to urban lakes. The results indicate that relative independence exists between different towns, and the spatial characteristics are different depending on scales and locations. In most of cases, the road density is lower where closer to the lakeshore while the housing price exhibits an opposite pattern. We conclude that city governments and urban planners should give more considerations to these spatial differences, somewhere should be better planned and protected as an important waterfront and somewhere the control of unreasonable real estate development nearby should be strengthened.