Methodology

A standardised measurement makes walkability easily studied analytically and across various disciplines. Attempts to create walkability measures started in the 1990s, with increasingly sophisticated composite walkability indices being proposed in the past decade. One that gained wide attention is Walk Score, which is developed by a group of planners and urbanists and provides standardised walkability evaluations. Leveraging on web and amenities data, Walk Score evaluates a great number of cities in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ready-to-use scoring data and algorithms permit extensive evaluation by practitioners and researchers without their own modelling capacity.

This project will support pilot studies to refine research questions, and methodologies, and confirm the feasibilities of biding an external research impact fund on interdisciplinary assessments of how volumetric developments in metro infrastructure projects generate social, economic, health and wellbeing impacts for society in Greater Bay Area, within the institution, urban design, land finance and political contexts in China. This study extends the works and findings of several nationally competitive research grants, and practice funds from industries Dr Guibo Sun, Prof. Chris Webster, and Prof. Kelvin Wong have accomplished (see the list in the proposal). A sheer number of metro projects have been planned and constructed in Greater Bay Area. The findings can help transform the cities in this region because cities in Greater Bay Area rely on metro development to sustain their high-density built environment. Moreover, the investigation allows us to provide an in-depth understanding of the mechanism in the numerous new metro lines built in China and offer remediation guidelines to improve them further. Noted it is a metro-city-building era for Chinese cities. Over 50 metro lines could be planned or constructed in China in one year. In addition, China is actively extending the metro-city building model to Belt and Road countries, such as Ethiopia, Vietnam and Israel. Hence, the impact pathways expand from China to abroad.

“I do not want to reach the destination so quickly when travelling by bus. So, I will get off the bus at places being a little far away from the destination and then walk to the destination. In this way, I can have a little more exercise. I have little other daily exercises, and I can have an amount of about one hour of exercise if I make my travel in this way. I believe this will make me live longer.” A quote from a 72 years participant

There is a growing interest in using natural experiments for causal inference, considering how built environment changes brought by urban planning and design practices can be structured as health interventions. Without randomisation in intervention exposure as a randomised control experiment does, the challenge of natural experiments for inferring causality lies in validating approximate random distribution of confounding effects between treatment and control groups.