Portraying urban landscape: A quantitative analysis system applied in fifteen metropolises in China

Abstract

Urban landscape is closely related to human living environment. Optimizing urban landscapes can promote urban vitality and quality, which is the latest goal of modern urban sustainable development. However, compared with studies at macro-level in large areas (i.e. cities) or micro-level in small areas (i.e. buildings), the fine research on quantifying urban landscape characteristics in large areas are insufficient, though it has stronger linkages with reality and planning. This paper proposed a quantification analysis system for regional urban landscape studies with block as the study unit and built on three aspects, including city plan, pattern of building forms and urban land use. Spatial and contrastive analysis were adopted to portray urban landscape in 15 typical Chinese cities using geographical open data. Urban landscape in metropolises of China had clear spatial regularity with the distance away from the main center. Besides, most of urban landscape indicators had more than one center and the main center was matched with the area of highest land price and geometric center in most of metropolises, and the attraction of sub-centers still had significant gap with the main center. Meantime, different cities may indeed display distinctive spatial signatures due to their different development conditions, for example, the landscape features of Guangzhou and Suzhou did not have superiority compared with other cities at similar level. More importantly, quantitative study scope and dimension of fine urban landscape was expanded and a uniform and comparable standard for block-level urban landscape analysis in large area was established.