Towards a multiple-scenario approach for walkability assessment: An empirical application in Shenzhen, China

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Highlights

  • Pedestrians have heterogeneous needs, capacities and preferences for walkability.

  • Rethink walkability in a more relational and context-specific way.

  • A multiple-scenario approach for walkability assessment is proposed.

  • This approach is empirically tested with selected neighbourhoods in Shenzhen, China.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to use a relational lens to understand walkability by acknowledging that what constitutes a walkable environment may vary considerably between pedestrians who have different needs, capacities, and purposes. A multiple-scenario approach is developed for assessing walkability, which recognises that in valuation, major components in walkability assessment may not always compensate each other. The analysis accommodates the idea that some components may be so important to certain people or in particular situations that they act as hard and non-negotiable constraints on valuation. Other components, however, are negotiable and lower scores can be compensated by, and traded against, higher scores on others. The procedures for applying the multiple-scenario approach to a rapidly developing city in China are presented, using an environmental audit and reliability tests with data collected from four neighbourhoods of Shenzhen. The proposed approach offers an innovative way to account for different situations of assessing walkability, and challenges the traditional assumption of walkability by creating multiple scenarios that cater for the specific needs and preferences of pedestrians.

Introduction

The accumulating evidence on the benefits of walking for physical and psychological health has attracted much interest from policymakers seeking to create a more sustainable urban environment (City of Melbourne, 2014; Transport for London, 2018). In line with this trend, many studies have been devoted to using different methods to assess walkability1, including geographic information systems, environmental audits, and questionnaire surveys (Cerin, Chan, Macfarlane, Lee, & Lai, 2011; Cole, Dunn, Hunter, Owen, & Sugiyama, 2015; Koohsari et al., 2016; Pikora et al., 2003). However, most of these studies have seen walkability as a universal quality and assumed that a single walkability index can be applied in many different locations, contexts and situations (Frank et al., 2010; Lefebvre-Ropars, Morency, Singleton, & Clifton, 2017; Nickelson, Wang, Mitchell, Hendricks, & Paschal, 2013; Zuniga-Teran et al., 2019). Such practice implicitly assumes that all pedestrians perceive and respond to the walking environment in a similar way. Nonetheless, this mode of thinking overlooks the fact that understandings of what constitutes a walkable environment can vary considerably between different groups of people who have their own specific needs, purposes and preferences.

Moreover, individuals’ experiences of walkability may be mediated by the places in which they have lived in the past or currently reside, as previous and recent experiences can shape how pedestrians interpret specific features of the built environment and the understanding of walkability (Chan, Li, Schwanen, & Banister, 2020). As a result, in this paper we argue that walkability needs to be understood in a more relational way, by considering how individuals with specific bodily capacities and understandings interact with various features of the built environment and other objects in places (Andrews, Hall, Evans, & Colls, 2012; Duff, 2010). Rather than seeing walkability as a single quality that unifies the environmental features, we argue that walkability should be reconceptualised as a relational quality that emerges from the current and past interactions between pedestrians and the environments in which they dwell, walk and use different means of transport.

To operationalise this concept, we apply the principle of non-compensatory decision rules to develop a set of walkability scenarios to assess walkability for different pedestrian groups or situations. This approach takes into account that for some pedestrians or in certain situations, particular environmental qualities must be present for a segment of a street or footpath to be considered walkable; their absence, or a low level of quality, cannot be compensated by the presence of other qualities. The five scenarios presented in this study can be regarded as a starting point to widen our understanding of walkability with a more flexible and relational perspective.

The literature on walkability assessment has been dominated by studies in the global North. Recently, studies from cities in less developed countries are growing but are still relatively scarce (Albers, Wright, & Olwoch, 2010; Habibian & Hosseinzadeh, 2018; Su et al., 2014; Sun, Webster, & Chiaradia, 2017). Given that the population density, urban structure and walking environment are hugely different between cities in the developed and developing countries (Alfonzo, Guo, Lin, & Day, 2014), studies that are focused specifically on understanding walkability in the developing world are essential. Although Shenzhen has been recognised as one of the most walkable cities in China (Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC, 2014), it is also experiencing rapid urban expansion and growth in automobile ownership. The daily average number of walking trips made by Shenzhen citizen has been decreasing as indicated in the most recent travel characteristics survey (Shenzhen Urban Planning & Research Centre, 2017). In view of this situation, there is an urgent need to improve the understanding and assessment of walkability in this rapidly changing urban environment.

The aim of this paper is to present a multiple-scenario approach for walkability assessment and empirically apply this approach in selected neighbourhoods of Shenzhen. The approach allows us to reconceptualise walkability as a relational construct where the saliency of specific attributes may differ between population groups and/or according to the situation.

Section snippets

Walkability and relational thinking

The constant debates on the meaning of walkability in research, practice and public discussions did not prevent the frequency of its application, and a large number of studies have developed tools and/or indices to measure walkability. In a recent literature review, Vale, Saraiva, and Pereira (2016) categorised 80 studies that measures active accessibility into four major types based on their methodological and computational similarities, namely: distance-based, gravity-based, topographical or

Research procedures

This section introduces the procedures for conducting the multiple-scenario and relational walkability assessment, which consists of four major parts, namely: tool development, data collection, data preparation, and scenario construction. Fig. 1 shows the major steps involved in this approach.

The first stage was to identify the major qualities of walkability and select appropriate measurement items to be included in the environmental audit tool. This was done with the help of a combination of

Results

This results section consists of two parts. The first sub-section presents the descriptive statistics and one-way ANOVA to compare the overall walkability among neighbourhoods for the five walkability scenarios; the next sub-section further compares the changes in walkability for footpaths when assessed using different scenarios and highlights the applicability of each walkability scenario in different situations and conditions.

Discussion and conclusion

In this study we propose a new lens to see walkability as relational and emerging from the interactions between pedestrians and their environment. Since a footpath that is regarded as walkable to one individual may not perceived to be equally walkable by others, it is important to consider the heterogeneity of pedestrians and their diverse needs, capacities and preferences in walkability assessment. The proposed multiple-scenario approach for walkability assessment advances our current

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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