This study constitutes a new approach to quantitative analysis of people's housing preferences. Using medium-sized apartments in Beijing as an example, seven floor plans were developed and a questionnaire survey was conducted where the respondents were asked to decide between different pairs of floor plans based on their own preferences. Based on the data, the spatial properties of the floor plans were examined and sample families were classified by their attributes. Using a modeling approach, the preferences for housing floor plans of various family groups were estimated and discussed in detail. The results demonstrated that ‘privacy,’ ‘south-facing,’ ‘storage,’ and ‘number of rooms’ were the critical means of evaluation of the floor plans of medium-sized apartments. The preferences of different family groups differed significantly and most families were quite selective regarding floor plans. Thus, high-level customization is necessary in architectural design and information services. The preference indices revealed to what extent people were satisfied with different floor plans and suggested precise ways to improve satisfaction with regard to layout plans. In addition, the results implied that, for apartments smaller than 90 m², essential functions or ‘housing utility’ must be given priority. In particular, a dining room and a study room were considered mandatory, but a separate storage room was not required.

One of the challenges in response to population aging is to meet needs for elderly care among older people especially for those who want to age in their homes or communities. However, disabled older people have more challenges due to their restricted mobility to access care resources than non-disabled ones. We propose a new framework based on the changing relationship between older people and their environment, in which resource linkage in elderly care utilization is emphasized. We conducted a survey with 139 participants (i.e., older people age 60 years or over with different level of disabilities) in three types of neighborhoods in Beijing, China. By conducting a decision tree analysis under the Person-Environment Link (P-E Link) model, we (1) characterized unmet needs for elderly care (activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) assistance) among community-dwelling disabled older people; (2) found disabled older people had more unmet needs for both ADL and IADL assistance because of a lack in linkages to care resources than non-disabled ones; and (3) characterized the linkages to care resources for better supporting disabled older people to age in place, including family support, social connection, and spatial environment. Our findings help improve the Anderson behavioral model by characterizing enabling environments, which highlights that not only the availability of enabling resources but also linkages to these enabling resources play an important role in meeting needs for care among disabled older people. Our findings can also inform improvements in policy design that are targeted to reduce elderly care inequalities.

Urban parks play a key role in urban sustainable development. This paper proposes a method for the evaluation of public parks from the perspective of accessibility and quality. The method includes the data extraction of urban park locations and the delineation of urban built-up areas. The processing of urban park data not only involves the extraction from digital maps, but also the classification of urban parks using a semi-automated model in ArcGIS. The urban area is identified using the Point of Interest (POI) data in digital maps, taking economic and human activities into consideration. The service area and its overlapped time is included in the evaluation indicators. With a clear definition of park and urban built-up area, the evaluation result of urban parks is of great comparability. Taking China as an example, the quality of urban parks in 273 prefecture-level cities has been evaluated. The results show that the average service coverage of urban parks in Chinese cities is 64.8%, and that there are significant disparities between cities with different population sizes and locations. The results suggest the necessity to improve public parks in small-and-medium sized cities and inland areas to strengthen the coordination of urbanization and regional development.

China is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes and has suffered a high number of earthquake casualties. Therefore, it is imperative to develop effective methods for assessing population vulnerability in order to provide practical and useful information for pre-disaster preparedness and emergency management. However, there are many problems with existing approaches to assessing population vulnerability in China. This study developed a method combining dasymetric population mapping with population vulnerability indexing to estimate populations’ vulnerability to earthquakes at block level in daytime and nighttime. The method aims to provide high spatial-temporal resolution information on vulnerable populations and population vulnerability. In a case study of Haidian District in Beijing, we combined our population spatialization model with a population vulnerability assessment model and sensitivity analysis to efficiently identify areas with high population vulnerability, the location of vulnerable populations, and key sensitive factors influencing population vulnerability during daytime and nighttime. This information can be used to identify where and which aspects of pre-disaster mitigation, preparedness, and emergency response activities should be prioritized. It is expected that these methods will be used to analyze vulnerable populations and population vulnerability in other areas of China.