With the ongoing advancement of urban renewal and cultural tourism, public spaces within historic cultural districts face dual challenges of structural complexity and diverse user demands. There is an urgent need to establish a scientific, user-oriented evaluation system to enhance spatial quality and user satisfaction. This study takes the Nanhesha Historic and Cultural Quarter in Yangzhou as a case study, focusing on two primary user groups: tourists and local residents. Employing semi-structured interviews and grounded theory, it distils a demand evaluation framework comprising four dimensions—spatial structure, environmental perception, socio-cultural aspects, and facility systems—with a total of 21 indicators. Subsequently, employing the Delphi method, experts were invited to refine the indicators through two rounds of deliberation. The Kano model was then applied to classify the demand attributes of different groups, identifying five common demands and sixteen differentiated demands. These were categorised into three sensitivity levels. Further integrating the Satisfaction Increment Index (SII), Dissatisfaction Decrement Index (DDI), and sensitivity values, a two-dimensional prioritisation model was constructed. This yielded a unified three-tier priority system alongside independent ranking frameworks for each user group. Findings reveal that visitors prioritise immediate experiential attributes such as spatial accessibility, appropriate scale, and environmental cleanliness, whereas residents favour long-term usage-oriented aspects including cultural expression, convenient facilities, and climate adaptability. This research not only enriches the theoretical framework for studying public space perception in historic cultural districts but also provides actionable evaluation criteria and practical pathways for multi-stakeholder spatial optimisation design. It offers guidance for the high-quality, refined development of public spaces within historic quarters.

With the advancement of refined urban governance and the construction of high-quality public spaces, street furniture design and usage face multiple challenges, including insufficient public participation and a neglect of actual user experience. These issues highlight the urgent need to establish a scientifically grounded user evaluation framework to inform design practices. This study focuses on Yangzhou Ecological Science and Technology New Town and, drawing on field investigation, grounded theory, and the Delphi method, develops a street furniture design evaluation framework encompassing three core dimensions: planning and configuration, environmental coordination, and operational management. Building on this framework, the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation method are employed to conduct a holistic assessment of the street furniture and to identify critical design deficiencies. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively identifies the strengths and weaknesses of street furniture and provides robust support for formulating targeted optimization strategies. The results reveal significant variations in the perceived importance of design factors among different user groups. Residents primarily emphasize practicality and convenience in daily use. Tourists value aesthetic expression and cultural resonance, whereas government officials focus on construction standardization and maintenance efficiency. In terms of satisfaction, all three groups reported relatively low scores, with the ranking as follows: “planning and configuration” > “management and operations” > “environmental coordination.” Based on these findings, the study proposes targeted design guidelines for future practice. The evaluation framework has been adopted by local authorities, incorporated into official street furniture design guidelines, and implemented in pilot projects—demonstrating its practical applicability and value. This research contributes to the theoretical advancement of street furniture design and provides empirical and methodological support for applications in other emerging urban areas and new town developments.

With the acceleration of global urbanisation, the pace of evolution in urban waterfront areas has intensified, consequently hastening the renewal rate of their constituent public spaces. Compared to the macro-level planning and regulation of traditional port and coastal waterfronts, balancing the historical preservation of urban heritage waterfront public spaces with contemporary demands has emerged as a critical issue in urban regeneration. This study examines the historical waterfront area of the Xiaoqinhuai River in Yangzhou, establishing a public space perception evaluation framework encompassing five dimensions: spatial structure, landscape elements, environmental perception, socio-cultural context, and facility systems. This framework comprises 33 secondary indicators. The perception assessment system was developed through a literature review, field research, and expert interviews, refined using the Delphi method, and weighted via the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Finally, cloud modelling was employed to evaluate perceptions among residents and visitors. Findings indicate that spatial structure and socio-cultural dimensions received high perception ratings, highlighting historical layout and cultural identity as strengths of the Xiaoqinhuai Riverfront public space, while significant shortcomings were noted in terms of landscape elements, environmental perception, and facilities. These deficiencies manifest primarily in limited vegetation diversity, inadequate hard paving and surface materials, insufficient landscape node design, poor thermal comfort, suboptimal air quality and olfactory perception, uncomfortable resting facilities, limited activity diversity, and inadequate slip-resistant surfaces. Further analysis reveals perceptual differences between residents and visitors: the former prioritise daily living needs, while the latter emphasise cultural experiences and recreational facilities. Based on these findings, this paper proposes targeted optimisation strategies emphasising the continuity of historical context and enhancement of spatial inclusivity. It recommends improving public space quality through multi-dimensional measures including environmental perception enhancement, landscape system restructuring, and the tiered provision of facilities. This research offers an actionable theoretical framework and practical pathway for the protective renewal, public space reconstruction, and optimisation of contemporary urban historic waterfront areas, demonstrating broad transferability and applicability.

Although green housing is widely regarded as an effective solution to energy and environmental challenges, its actual rate of adoption remains lower than expected. In the context of increasingly prominent sustainable development goals, promoting residents’ adoption of green housing has become a key issue in advancing sustainable transformation within the housing sector. Consequently, enhancing residents’ willingness to adopt green housing is critical to its broader diffusion. Drawing on diffusion of innovation theory, attitude theory, and perceived value theory, this study develops a multidimensional integrated model to identify factors influencing the adoption of green housing. The model examines how the innovation attributes of green housing and residents’ psychological evaluations jointly shape adoption intention. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 387 residents in Nanjing, China, and the data were analysed using partial least squares modelling. The results indicate that the five attributes derived from diffusion of innovation theory are significant antecedents of residents’ attitudes. Relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, and observability exert significant positive effects on residents’ attitudes toward adopting green housing, with relative advantage emerging as the most influential factor. Complexity has a negative, though comparatively weaker, effect on residents’ attitudes toward green housing adoption. Residents’ attitudes and perceived value are identified as significant predictors of green housing adoption intention. These findings contribute to a clearer understanding of residents’ green housing adoption intentions for both researchers and practitioners. More importantly, the study offers general policy and managerial implications for governments and developers seeking to enhance the uptake of green housing.

Existing studies on cultural landscape genes in traditional villages have largely focused on the identification of objective elements, while paying insufficient attention to the associations between tourists’ subjective perceptions, Place identity, and Satisfaction. Taking the five nationally recognized traditional villages in Wuxi, China, as case studies, this study constructs an association model linking cultural landscape gene perception, Place identity, and Satisfaction. The model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling based on 392 tourist questionnaires. The results indicate that Perceived Environmental Character, Perceived Settlement Morphology, Perceived Architectural Characteristics, and Perceived Cultural Attributes are all significantly and positively associated with both Place identity and Satisfaction. Place identity is also significantly and positively associated with Satisfaction. In terms of the standardized path coefficients, Perceived Settlement Morphology shows a relatively strong association with Place identity (β = 0.285), while Perceived Architectural Characteristics shows a relatively strong association with Satisfaction (β = 0.257). The model explains 41.2% of the variance in Place identity and 54.1% of the variance in Satisfaction. Both the direct paths between the four dimensions of cultural landscape gene perception and Satisfaction and the indirect paths through Place identity are statistically significant, indicating that Place identity plays a partial mediating role. This study extends Cultural Landscape Gene Theory from the identification of objective landscape elements to the levels of tourist perception and tourism evaluation, and reveals that Place identity may constitute a psychological pathway linking cultural landscape perception with Satisfaction. In practice, the perceptibility of village spatial patterns, architectural appearance, environmental characteristics, and cultural content should be comprehensively maintained to enhance tourists’ Place identity and overall experience evaluations.

Understanding the spatial distribution patterns and siting characteristics of traditional villages provides an important basis for informing their conservation and spatial planning. This study employed geographic information system (GIS)-based spatial analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), and clustering analysis to investigate the spatial distribution patterns, environmental associations, and siting typologies of traditional villages in the Taihu Basin. The results revealed that traditional villages in the Taihu Basin exhibited a spatial pattern characterized by large-scale clustering and localized scattered distributions, with their spatial distribution patterns and siting characteristics significantly associated with topographic, climatic, and hydro-ecological conditions. The siting of traditional villages was closely associated with variations in topographic, climatic, and hydro-ecological conditions. Different environmental factors jointly contributed to the formation of differentiated siting patterns of traditional villages. Among these factors, topographic and climatic characteristics showed relatively high contributions to distinguishing overall environmental variations, whereas hydrological conditions reflected the strong spatial association between traditional villages and regional water systems in the Taihu Basin. Based on the results of PCA and clustering analysis, traditional villages in the Taihu Basin were classified into three major siting typologies: mountainous steep-slope humid villages, plain waterfront warm–humid villages and plain gentle-slope sunny villages. This study revealed the environmental adaptation patterns underlying traditional village siting at the basin scale, providing scientific insights for traditional village typology identification, regional conservation, and spatial planning.