Building-Based Analysis of the Spatial Provision of Urban Parks in Shenzhen, China

Urban parks provide important environmental, social, and economic benefits to people and urban areas. The literature demonstrates that proximity to urban parks is one of the key factors influencing people's willingness to use them. Therefore, the provision of urban parks near residential areas and workplaces is one of the key factors influencing quality of life. This study designed a solution based on the spatial association between urban parks and buildings where people live or work to identify whether people in different buildings have nearby urban parks available for their daily lives. A building density map based on building floor area (BFA) was used to illustrate the spatial distribution of urban parks and five indices were designed to measure the scales, service coverage and potential service loads of urban parks and reveal areas lacking urban park services in an acceptable walking distance. With such solution, we investigated the provision of urban parks in ten districts of Shenzhen in China, which has grown from several small villages to a megacity in only 30 years. The results indicate that the spatial provision of urban parks in Shenzhen is not sufficient since people in about 65% of the buildings cannot access urban parks by walking 10-min. The distribution and service coverage of the existing urban parks is not balanced at the district level. In some districts, the existing urban parks have good numbers of potential users and even have large service loads, while in some districts, the building densities surrounding the existing parks are quite low and at the same time there is no urban parks nearby some high-density areas.