The people-oriented city serves as the value orientation of urban work in the new era, and age-friendliness is precisely its core practical standard for intergenerational equity and inclusive sharing. Currently, the renovation of old residential areas should transcend single-dimensional physical patching and shift towards an all-age-friendly model that meets the complex needs of multi-age groups. Taking Tuanjiehu Communities in Beijing as a case study, this research constructs an evaluation system covering three dimensions—place, atmosphere, and culture—and 22 third-level indicators, and adopts the Semantic Differential Method (SD) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to quantitatively analyze residents’ perceptions. The study finds that old residential areas generally suffer from problems such as “insufficient place safety and functionality, lack of atmospheric vitality, and weak cultural cultivation”. Based on these findings, a progressive renewal strategy of “Consolidating Safety Foundation → Boosting Community Vitality → Cultivating Community Culture” is proposed, offering an empirical illustration for the all-age-friendly renovation of high-density urban old residential areas to transform from “survival-oriented” spaces to “life-oriented” homes, offering preliminary insights for the all-age-friendly renovation of similar high-density urban old residential areas.

As China shifts from expansion-oriented urbanization to stock-based renewal, cities need diagnostic tools that can identify built-environment deficiencies and translate them into spatially targeted renewal priorities. Building on China’s official urban physical examination system, this study develops a land-renewal-oriented diagnostic workflow across four spatial scales: housing, community, block, and urban area. The framework integrates top-down objective assessment of land, facilities, infrastructure, environment, and safety conditions with bottom-up resident satisfaction evaluation. It then converts composite health scores, problem concentration, and safety relevance into three renewal priority categories: Priority Level III (critical renewal), Priority Level II (general renewal), and Priority Level I (long-term optimization). Using Wu’an, a resource-dependent county-level city in Hebei Province, as a case study, the results show that Priority Level III problems are concentrated mainly at the housing scale, especially corridor safety hazards, while widespread pipeline aging and age-friendly retrofitting needs are classified as Priority Level II medium-term renewal issues. Community and block scales mainly show facility, governance, and functional mismatches. The contribution of this study is not the four-tier scale structure itself, which is derived from existing policy, but the operational translation of urban physical examination results into spatial diagnosis for land renewal, renewal priority classification, and action-plan formulation. The workflow offers a transferable methodological reference for county-level stock renewal, while local indicators, thresholds, and implementation pathways require contextual adaptation.

Under the pressing imperative of achieving “dual carbon” goals and advancing urban low-carbon transitions, understanding how neighborhood spatial environments influence carbon emissions has become a critical challenge for enabling refined governance and precise planning in urban carbon reduction. Taking the central urban area of Xining as a case study, this research establishes a high-precision estimation framework by integrating Semantic Segmentation of Street View Images and Point of Interest data. This study employs a Geographically Weighted XGBoost model to capture the spatial non-stationarity of emission drivers, achieving a median R² of 0.819. The results indicate the following: (1) Socioeconomic functional attributes, specifically POI Density and POI Mixture, exert a more dominant influence on carbon emissions than purely visual features. (2) Lane Marking General shows a strong positive correlation by reflecting traffic pressure, Sidewalks exhibit a clear negative correlation by promoting active travel, and Building features display a distinct asymmetric impact, where the driving effect of high density is notably less pronounced than the negative association observed in low-density areas. (3) The development of low-carbon neighborhoods should prioritize optimizing functional mixing and enhancing pedestrian systems to construct resilient and low-carbon urban spaces. This study reveals the non-linear relationship between street visual features and neighborhood carbon emissions, providing an empirical basis and strategic references for neighborhood planning and design oriented toward low-carbon goals, with valuable guidance for practices in urban planning, design, and management.

This study establishes an evaluation index system for the Green Transition Level of resource-based cities in Shanxi Province from four aspects: economy, society, resources, and ecology. It describes the temporal and spatial variations in the Green Transition Level of these cities, reveals the disparities among them, and analyzes the differences and underlying reasons in the changes in the Green Transition Level across different types of resource-based cities based on a reclassification. The research results indicate that economic development is the most significant factor affecting the Green Transition Level of resource-based cities. During the period of 2015–2023, the Green Transition Level of most resource-based cities in Shanxi Province experienced substantial growth, with northern resource-based cities demonstrating faster green development. Furthermore, the overall Green Transition Level of developing, potential, and declining resource-based cities all improved to varying degrees during this period, whereas the Green Transition Level of shrinking resource-based cities showed no improvement.

In recent years, the agentive role of youth groups in urban regeneration has garnered increasing academic attention. As vital carriers of urban cultural heritage, the ways in which historic districts can leverage youth dynamics to achieve vitality revitalization have emerged as a key research issue. This study selects the Fayuan Temple Historic and Cultural District in Beijing as an empirical case, constructs a public space evaluation system grounded in the concept of “youth-friendliness,” adopts a mixed-method approach integrating field surveys, questionnaire administration, and multi-source data mining, and employs Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) modeling for deconstruction. Based on behavioral characteristic differences, youth within the district are categorized into two groups: “resident/local youth” and “transient visiting youth.” The comprehensive experience quality scores were 3.559 (Fair) for resident and local youth and 3.85 (Fair) for temporary visitors, with cultural space scoring highest for both groups. Resident youth demonstrate stronger demands for renewal concerning the completeness of cultural facilities, diversity of commercial formats, and street navigability. Transient visiting youth, by contrast, exhibit greater concern for eight factors: pedestrian safety and comfort, static traffic order, diversity of commercial formats, quality of consumption environment, richness of social venues, pleasantness of spatial scale, landscape interactivity, and street navigability. These findings indicate that youth groups with varying interactive relationships with historic districts possess significantly heterogeneous needs regarding public space utilization, and their expectations for historic district regeneration also manifest differentiated characteristics. This provides a scientific basis for formulating precise, multi-layered strategies for district renewal.

To address the shortage of officially designated shelters and the uncertain usability of candidate open spaces in high-density historic urban districts, this study develops a GIS-based framework integrating open-space screening, road network analysis, network-based travel time accessibility, the enhanced two-step floating catchment area method (E2SFCA), and multidimensional validation in Xicheng District, Beijing. Ten official shelters and 173 candidate shelters were identified. At 72 m/min, 15 min population coverage increased from 23.98% for official shelters to 97.72% for the combined configuration. Independent coefficient perturbation produced a median Spearman correlation of 0.9945, but random failure of 20% and 40% of candidates reduced the median correlation to 0.9172 and 0.8126, respectively. Capacity-constrained assignment served 77.11% and 54.65% of the population at 1 and 2 m²/person. A hutong-speed penalty, multiscale catchments and decay, symmetric boundary buffers, exact network closeness, and a 30-site image check further define the conditions under which the candidate system remains effective. The framework separates statutory provision from planning-stage candidates and identifies where shelter verification, spatial supplementation, and route or entrance improvements are most needed.