519 / 2019-02-28 18:21:42

Exploring Association between Urban Form and Cycling from the Perspective of Space Syntax：An Empirical Research of Yangpu District of Shanghai

Urban form, Cycling, Space Syntax, Integration, Shanghai

全体主题 > Spatial data collection, Analysis, and Visualization

Research on the correlation between physical activity and urban built environment has received extensive attention. Based on how urban built environment causes travel, most of the previous studies focus on spatial features such as land use, size, density, and location at different geographic scales. In fact, the spatial configuration of urban form, which can be described as the street network, is related to how people use urban space. While streets are most obvious global entity in the city, few studies pay attention to the influence of the dynamic morphological characteristics of the street network on physical activity. It is worth exploring how individuals are affected by the surrounding spatial elements in the process of movement. According to the theory of spatial syntax, the spatial configuration of the street network is a decisive factor for the movement pattern.
This paper, therefore, attempts to explore the association between urban form and cycling from the perspective of space syntax, adopting Yangpu District of Shanghai as the case. Location data of bicycles from the Mobike, a biking sharing service provider, is analyzed to identify the impact of morphological characteristics of urban space on cycling. The spatial network model based on the notion of an ‘axial map’ is established by spatial syntax. The variables, such as connectivity, integration and depth, are used to measure the spatial topological features of urban space, and then a Pearson correlation analysis was used to assess the correlation between cycling activity and street network morphological characteristics. It is discovered that streets with high integration are highly relevant to the distribution of starting and ending points, while streets with high connectivity are more relevant to riding through activities. This paper is concluded that the influence of urban spatial elements on cycling present to be heterogeneous in terms of morphological characteristics.