.png){kind=small}
Pedestrian Environment in High Density Cities
Via Zoom
Mr Zhang Feiyang PhD Student, Department of Geography, HKU
Abstract:
As the population density continues to increase in big cities, there has been growing research interests in the pedestrian environment, in order to enhance livability and sustainability. Existing literatures have recognized the important function of the ground-level pedestrian environment (i.e., streets) in terms of connecting destinations and providing public space for social interaction. More recently, the benefits of walkable urban environment to public health have also been widely discussed, leading to a growing interest in the assessment of pedestrian environment, both for the purpose of research and actual street improvement projects. However, existing methods of assessing pedestrian environment either fail to capture the street-level details of pedestrian environment, or demand too much labor and time to be applied at large scale. With the help of machine learning, street view images/videos data, and other Internet of Things (IoT) data, this research firstly aims to explore the possibility of assessing street-level details of pedestrian environment at city scale. The findings will both contribute to the field of study and help improve the efficiency of the actual street improvement projects. Furthermore, although some research had been done to explore the relationship between pedestrian environment and neighborhood social capital, the findings are contradicting each other and not yet conclusive. By measuring the pedestrian environment, people’s activity-travel pattern, and neighborhood social capital, the relationship between these factors can be further explored, which will provide meaningful contributions to travel behavior, sociology, and urban geography research.