Livability assessment of 101,630 communities in China’s major cities: A remote sensing perspective

Some of China’s major cities have entered the middle and late stages of urbanization, and the development focus of these cities has gradually shifted from outward expansion to inward renewal. The community, as the basic unit of a city, is undoubtedly the main object of urban renewal. In order to efficiently and effectively address the problems in current community construction, it is necessary to conduct a large-scale in-depth assessment of the community livability, which can directly imply the satisfaction of residents with their quality of life. This study achieved the first comprehensive livability assessment at the individual community scale for 42 major cities of China from the perspective of remotely sensed and crowd-sourced geographic information. Specifically, we produced abundant fine-grained datasets for 42 cities, including high-resolution land cover maps interpreted from Ziyuan-3 satellites (ZY-3, 2.1 m), building height, point-of-interest, and boundaries of 101,630 communities. As designed in our proposed framework, the community livability was evaluated by 5 level-1 indicators, 27 level-2 indicators and an integrated community livability index (CLI). A number of interesting findings were obtained from this assessment: (1) According to the expert questionnaires, living comfort was considered as the most important livability factor for residents with the highest weight, while the building environment was rated the least. The negative factors (e.g., the factories around the community) impacted more on livability than the positive ones. (2) Most communities in major Chinese cities were characterized by dense buildings and sparse green spaces. (3) In these cities, community security construction was severely insufficient, particularly in less developed regions. (4) Imbalanced community livability development was prevalent across cities, and simultaneously, the CLI distribution within cities also exhibited significant spatial aggregation and heterogeneity. This research is expected to reveal the status quo of community livability in China, and thus allow for targeted policy formulation. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: Supplementary material is available for this article at 10.1007/s11430-021-9896-4 and is accessible for authorized users.