In the context of escalating global concerns for “carbon neutrality and peak carbon” and the urgent need for ecological conservation, deciphering the spatiotemporal interactions between carbon emissions and the ecosystem service value (ESV) in relation to land use changes becomes critically significant. Identifying areas to bolster ecosystem services and curtail carbon emissions, especially within the Guanzhong urban agglomeration, is crucial for advancing sustainable and low-carbon regional development. The study focuses on the urban agglomeration of Guanzhong, using land use and socio-economic data from three periods between 2010 and 2020. Methods such as grid analysis and bivariate spatial autocorrelation models are employed to explore the temporal and spatial evolution characteristics and interaction patterns of carbon emissions and ESV in relation to land use. The findings reveal: (1) during 2010–2020, the Guanzhong urban agglomeration experienced varied transitions in land use types, marked by a significant net decrease in arable land and net increases in grasslands and urban construction areas. (2) The ESV in the Guanzhong urban agglomeration witnessed a consistent rise, exhibiting a spatial distribution pattern with higher values in the southwest and lower in the northeast. Among the categorized ecosystem service functions, services related to hydrological and climate regulation stood out. (3) The Guanzhong urban agglomeration observed an average annual growth rate of 5.03% in carbon emissions due to land use, with a spatial trend that was higher in the center and tapered towards the periphery. Predominant carbon sources included arable lands and urban construction areas, while forests accounted for 94% of carbon sequestration. (4) A pronounced negative correlation between the ESV and carbon emissions was discerned in Guanzhong. Regions with a stronger correlation were primarily centered in Guanzhong, notably around Xi’an and Baoji. The results emphasize the pivotal role of the primary sector’s qualitative development in harmonizing the ESV and carbon emission dynamics in the Guanzhong urban agglomeration. This research provides valuable insights for optimizing land resource management, aligned with the rural revitalization strategy, streamlining carbon dynamics, bolstering ESV, augmenting carbon sequestration efficiency, and guiding ecological spatial planning.

As China’s urban renewal shifts comprehensively toward stock optimisation, everyday micro spaces in high-density old districts have emerged as critical yet underexplored carriers for rebuilding grassroots social capital. However, existing research remains largely confined to static assessments of physical form, lacking systematic insight into the process-based evolution of micro spaces and their governance implications. The aim of this study is to develop a process-based analytical framework that explains how everyday micro spaces emerge, evolve, and stabilise in high-density old urban districts, and to translate that explanation into stage- and type-differentiated governance pathways. Drawing on purposive sampling observation of over 170 micro spaces and snowball-sampled in-depth interviews with 45 residents in Xi’an’s walled historic district, this study employs thematic analysis to examine micro space formation, activation, and governance dynamics. A three-dimensional analytical framework of “Spatial Type–Perceived Need–Life Cycle” is constructed, classifying micro spaces into three categories, identifying a three-tier, nine-level perceived needs spectrum, and tracing a five-stage evolutionary process of Discovery–Activity–Renovation–Management–Identity. The findings reveal that residents’ spontaneous practices and psychological ownership formation are the core endogenous drivers of micro space evolution. The primary structural constraints are ambiguous property rights, institutional vacuums, and a structural rupture at the Renovation-to-Management transition, which we conceptualise as the “high-risk window period”. This study proposes a full life-cycle adaptive governance paradigm. Through phased, type-differentiated interventions, it matches governance supply to the evolving demands of each stage. The paradigm offers both theoretical and practical guidance for stimulating the endogenous vitality of everyday micro spaces in old urban districts.

As urban development in China shifts toward improving existing areas, the focus of evaluation is moving from availability to quality, yet assessments of the neighborhood built environment and living circles still stop at facility provision. This study decomposes the conversion from spatial supply to need fulfillment into three links—availability, reach-and-visibility, and need fulfillment. Encounterability (E) captures how far a spatial element enters everyday experience through physical reach or visual exposure; perceptual affordance (P) captures how well an encountered element supports six perceptual needs: social interaction, recreation and leisure, aesthetic experience, emotional experience, broad learning, and humanistic enrichment. Taking Xi’an’s historic old city as a typical case, public needs were translated through grounded coding into auditable elements, which trained assessors evaluated at the city, district, and neighborhood levels, with a four-quadrant diagnosis locating the gaps. The results show that, within this context of comparatively rich provision, the principal experiential gaps arise at the encounter and support links: encounterability is similar across levels while perceptual affordance diverges, and the share of synergy categories differs significantly across levels (p = 0.007), forming resource–encounter, node–route, and frequency–support mismatches; the principal mismatch patterns are robust to equal weighting and to moderate shifts in the quadrant thresholds. Basic needs fail on quality and advanced needs fail on encounter and interpretation, pointing to three renewal actions: retrofitting, opening, and interpretation. This study extends evaluation objects from facilities to a fuller spectrum of spatial elements, extends encounter to reach and visibility together, and extends output from ranking to gap localization, offering a low-cost diagnostic tool for the human-centered assessment of the built environment, applicable to living-circle evaluation, urban physical examination, and livability improvement in historic neighborhoods.