Understanding Neighborhood from sky, street and citizens

Research on public space has long been a primary focus in urban studies. Most previous studies have measured public space from the macro scale perspective, such as the distance to the city center, and therefore cannot specify the social significance and economic benefits related to its quality or details. Hence, we fill this gap by evaluating the impact of quality and the presence of specific public space elements on housing prices after dividing public space into two parts: public space surrounding the gated community (PSSG) and public space inside the gated community (PSIG). We measure the visible and touchable features of PSSG and PSIG and estimate the effects and the monetization value of PSSG and PSIG on housing prices. Our empirical analyses focused on the area within the Beijing 5th Ring Road and revealed the following: For the PSSG, wider streets, higher buildings along the streets, higher street greenery levels, higher proportions of street wall continuity, and lower street spatial disorder can contribute to higher housing prices. For PSIG, the presence of most gated community facilities can raise housing prices. We infer that the economic value of PSSG and PSIG, including housing prices will increase by 546 yuan/m2 as the gated community gains a sport field.

Predicting the Chinese population′s preferences of housing by studying their patterns and trends is an important aspect of national spatial planning and people-oriented urban development. However, previous studies on housing location choices mostly relied on traditional statistics and survey data, which were lacking in both scale and depth. By utilizing multisource data from communities within the Beijing Fifth Ring Road, such as mobile phone signal data, it is possible to extract the indicators of physical characteristics, surrounding amenities and social contexts. The studied communities are then categorized in terms of their physical environment / living service factors and their residential population attributes, and the relationship between the two is then analyzed to reveal the demographic profile of different kinds of community and also the decisive factors for residents to choose which community to live in.

This article first defines the "urban public space" as an open space that exists between the building entities in the city and could be used freely for the public based on literature review, and sets the main observation area as the internal and external public spaces of a total of 3,857 communities within the 5th Ring Road of Beijing. Secondly, through literature review, comprehensive research and methods using new data and technology to extract and quantify public space features at the micro-scale in recent years are selected. Then, the author chooses several spatial characteristics of internal and external public space of the neighborhood, and uses the hedonic pricing model in the related field to explore the effects of various internal and external public space characteristics on house prices. After analyzing the characteristic price regression model, the author further calculates the marginal implicit prices of each variable through the regression results, making the value evaluation of different public space characteristics in a more intuitive quantitative way. Finally, the author summarizes the analysis results, highlights the key indicators, and proposes corresponding urban space planning decisions. 

After empirical analysis of the study, it was found that: (1) the micro-scale public space characteristics extracted from emerging data, such as street form, street greenery, and the degree of disorder, can all affect the average housing price. Among all these variables, the degree of the disorder has the most significant effect on housing prices within the 5th Ring Road of Beijing; (2) The study also carried out a model robustness test of the characteristic price model. Based on the spatial autocorrelation and the regression model results between different rind roads, the credibility of the initial results was verified; (3) the study finally evaluates each related variables by using the marginal price analysis method to further monetize the impact of various public space variables on housing prices. Through this final step, it is believed that the actual impact of different housing characteristics on housing prices could be quantified in a more intuitive way.

Based on the results of the empirical analysis, the relevant policy recommendations of the urban development and management are sorted out in the last chapter, as well as the proposal for future research. Through a series of empirical studies, this article reveals the specific economic benefits of human-scale public space, hoping to support relevant departments to understand the value of urban public space in a more detailed perspective and improve the awareness and effectiveness of relevant decision-making on public space.