EXPLORING SPATIAL PARAMETERS TO EVALUATE HUMAN WALKING ACCESSIBILITY OF URBAN GREEN SPACE

Abstract. With the growth of urban population and the increasing urban density, urban green space has become a kind of precious and limited resources. It not only has a positive impact on the health of urban residents with high work-life pressure but also offers opportunities as part of blue-green solutions for sustainable urban water management. Therefore, to effectively utilise the limited green spaces, experts are exploring a way of organising the green space layout to balance human needs and other urban developing requirements (e.g., in this case, urban stormwater management) within the certain common area. With this target, translating the space accessibility to human and other urban developments on green space into space parameter is a critical step to organize space model for the multi-functional green space. Although there are plenty of existing spatial parameters developed for evaluating human accessibility (such as travel distance, land-use, spatial connectivity etc.), there isn’t a way to organize them to satisfy the diverse evaluation needs from different research purposes. Besides, most of them are suitable for analyzing space on a city scale or at least a precinct scale in a 2D model. To the accurate design on a micro-scale, it is still a big challenge. The reason is some parameters for city analysis don’t work on a micro-scale, and some parameters should be reorganised in the evaluation algorithm or should include more micro-scale factors. Thus, this paper, based on the characteristics of human behaviour, redefines the complex concept- accessibility and develop measurable parameters with feasible factors on micro-scale. Overall, this paper presents: (1) a new definition of walking accessibility of green space; (2) evaluation criteria (3) parameters (depth and Integration) reflecting connectivity criteria (4) Parameters (travel time and speed, slope, direction changes) relating travel distance criteria with updated evaluation algorithm and factors. This paper aims at useful spatial parameters and evaluation measures that are applicable to integrate human needs within multi-functional green space design, especially green stormwater management design.