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Table 7.2 shows the current planning regulations in which five types of facilities are basically required (Municipality, 2013): educational, health, commercial, cultural and sports facilities. Figures 7.2 and 7.3 presents the substantive spatial distributions of nearby amenities in the HD area. According to researcher’s onsite observations and spatial measurements, many existed facilities have met the regulation requirements (Table 7.2). Interestingly, all of them have received a positive result in the above appraisal. The predominant emphasis with the planning of the type of educational facility is noticeable (UPDIS, 2005), not only because a large built‐up area is required but also as an independent land provision15,which are both compulsory in local planning practices. Hence, positive social satisfaction occurs when the related planning inputs on neighbourhood amenities are effective. Another important point is that residents can usualy access these facilties without entering gated neighbourhoods (Figures 7.4 and 7.5). This is because except schools and sports playgrounds, most of amenties are plannned as storefronts of neighbourhoods and it is thus convenient for neaby inbabitants to share and ustilise them within a walkable radius (Figures 7.6 and 7.7). This is often described as the implementation of mixed‐use policy in Chinese neighbourhoods (Municipality, 2010, Ou et al., 2005). However, unlike other facilities, sports facilities are allowed to be embodied into neighbourhood sites in practice (Municipality, 2013). The control of available space for sports facilities could be considered in later neighbourhood design processes and embedded into enclosed neighbourhood development. However, its real social satisfaction among local inhabitants seems not to be as high as others in this assessment (Figure 7.1). A possible explanation is that the disappearance of open access is clear with the privatisation of developing facilities, which means a deprivation of the equal opportunity of sharing facilities. As a consequence, a potential social inequity may occur.
Table 7.2 Comparisons between planning requirement, implementation and social satisfaction
Type of facility ED HE CM CL SP SW*
ED1 (MH) ED2 (PR) ED3 (KG)
Minimum built up area (m2) 14,850 6,500 6,400 400 500 300 ‐‐‐‐‐ 300 Minimum plot area (m2) 25,200 8,700 7,200 ‐‐‐‐‐ ‐‐‐‐‐ ‐‐‐‐‐ 3,000 ‐‐‐‐‐
Implementation in full Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N
Satisfactory level (Likert Scale) 4.01 3.66 4.07 3.40 3.08 2.85
Note: all indices comply with 20,000 capita. ED1(MH) here refers to middle schools and high schools; ED2(PR) means primary
schools; ED3(KG) refers to kindergartens. Others: HE‐healthy facilities; CM‐commercial facilities; CL‐cultural facilities; SP‐ sports
facilities; SW‐social welfare facilities The requirement on social welfare facility is indicated ‘only a reference for mature urban
areas, but not compulsory’(Shenzhen, 2013).
15
Kindergarten is exempted from the independence requirement, (Shenzhen Urban Planning Standards and Guidelines,
Figure 7.2 The radius of nearby neighbourhood amenities in the case study area
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Figure 7.4 A primary school in HD with an
independent site
Figure 7.5 A neighbourhood kindergarten with a
standalone entrance for the public
Figure 7.6 The ground floor commercial spaces
with accesses to streets
Figure 7.7 A neighbourhood cultural centre (left)
and its nearby hospital service branch (right)
(All the photos in this Chapter were taken by the author)
However, a lack of social welfare (SW) facilities in the HD area was evidently found. This type of facility, which is newly added into the inclusions of public facilities in Shenzhen (Municipality, 2013), provides social assistance to vulnerable social groups, such as elder, disabled and homeless people. Recently, nursing homes and special hospices have been particularly developed at the city and district levels (Shenzhen, 2007). According to the cultural tradition (CGSS, 2013a), the family based caring system is still the major social stand of modern Chinese society (Mu, 2000). This study also found that the dissatisfaction with SW facilities seems to be less pronounced by participants who live in large families (r=.137, p=.040, Table 7.3). As the elderly population continuously grows (Shenzhen, 2007), caring for aged people has been recently encouraged through neighbourhood–level social welfare practices (Wang, 2013, Xi et al., 2013), which is a supplementary solution for the elderly who are unable to be cared for by their families. The spatial counterpart is to deliver special nursing rooms, day care centres and activity centres with the development of neighbourhoods. These proposals, however, are suggestive but non‐compulsory in the current planning process (Municipality, 2013). The general negative level of dissatisfaction in this assessment also affirms this point. At the moment, the function of social welfare is still mostly combined with the types of healthy/cultural facilities and neighbourhood service
centres in practice (UPDIS, 2007).
Interestingly, the two transport‐related indicators represent diverse results. The public transportation satisfaction receives the highest score among the ten indicators of ‘Basic Needs’ meanwhile the lowest satisfaction occurs with parking space. Most large Chinese cities are now similarly perplexed by heavy traffic conjunctions due to the continual increase of the vehicle ownership (Liu and Guan, 2005). Under the great pressure of the overwhelming populations, public transportation has become a special planning concern in many Chinese cities (Pucher et al., 2007, Li et al., 2015) with a considerable enhancement being recently given to the further development of the public transport system (Wen and Zhao, 2014). The general positive outcome of the satisfaction with public transport (SF_TR) indicates that the local public transport network is already accessible in this area. Benefits to neighbourhoods are mostly through the services of a prime subway station that is connected to the subway network and ten bus stops that are linked with citywide mass bus routes. By contrast, not enough attention has been paid to the shortage of parking space, which has become a big headache (Zhang et al., 2009). It is also believed to be related to an issue of the public‐private boundary in the planning system at the moment. Interviewee D1 indicates that particular solutions have not been provided enough by planners so far; now an insufficient number of parking spaces is prominent within the entire city but particularly in residential areas.
‘I have suggested that the local authority could redevelop the greening area along the main road. Although it is feasible, there is no response for this ‘cross‐department proposal’. It is also because problems at the bottom neighbourhood scale would often be described as ‘not a public issue’ or ‘out of the governmental responsibilities’ (D1, 2011).
Additionally, the correlation analysis suggested a generally weak association between the demographic feature and the social satisfaction with neighbourhood amenities and facilities. As can be seen from Table 7.3, many demographic factors are not or only weakly associated with social satisfaction results. Thus, residents’ basic needs satisfaction with their neighbourhood is not strongly affected by their social‐demographic features.
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Table 7.3 Spearman’s correlation: socio‐demographic features and basic needs satisfaction
Spearman's SP_ED SP_HE SP_CM SP_SW SP_CL SP_SP SP_PU SP_IS SP_TR SP‐PK Age Correlation Coefficient ‐.008 .038 ‐.024 .007 .031 ‐.008 ‐.100 ‐.091 ‐.087 .126 Sig.(2‐tailed) .907 .571 .719 .913 .642 .903 .133 .174 .193 .059 Household Member Correlation Coefficient ‐.071 .096 .030 .137 * .028 .046 .001 .040 .107 .154* Sig.(2‐tailed) .285 .148 .650 .040 .676 .491 .985 .548 .107 .021 Income Correlation Coefficient ‐.011 .092 .074 .081 .000 .083 .077 ‐.039 .069 ‐.085 Sig.(2‐tailed) .875 .170 .270 .227 .999 .213 .248 .558 .299 .202 Length of Residence Correlation Coefficient .091 ‐.021 .007 ‐.102 .043 ‐.084 ‐.190** ‐.185** ‐.111 ‐.097 Sig.(2‐tailed) .178 .759 .916 .130 .522 .215 .005 .006 .100 .153 Education Background Correlation Coefficient .008 ‐.001 .128 ‐.033 .016 ‐.077 .014 ‐.002 .144 * ‐.141* Sig.(2‐tailed) .907 .987 .056 .620 .807 .248 .834 .978 .031 .034
N=226, except N=220 for length of residence; **.Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2‐tailed). *.Correlation is
significant at the 0.05 level (2‐tailed).
7.3
Variationsindifferentpatternsofneighbourhoods
The above result only presents a general character regarding the entire research area Houhai‐Dengliang. However, as discussed in Chapter 6, varied neighbourhood forms present a split and unbalanced spatial feature. A question thus needs to be considered: is there any evident variation in the social satisfaction of basic needs based upon the variations of urban form? In this case study, the variation of basic needs satisfaction in different types of neighbourhoods was particularly analysed. The use of statistical analysis was also necessary as this could suggest whether a variance of the sample was significant enough to represent the entire population with certain confidence levels. The framework of analysis has also been discussed in Chapter 5. The results of 5‐point Likert scale assessments were treated as interval scale data, for which the ANOVA test was a powerful statistical method to examine the variations between groups. Additionally, Levene's basic test for homogeneity of variances was further applied. This was because when the significance from this test was less than 0.05, then variances were great, and traditional parametric tests were not appropriate. Thus, the enhanced Welch F test was used instead of the normal ANOVA test in order to underpin the accuracy of analyses. The ‘Tukey post hoc test’ was additionally applied to compare the differences between each type of neighbourhood pattern. Similarly under the circumstance of violated data homogeneity, the enhanced Games‐Howell analysis was applied instead of the Tukey post hoc test. The ANOVA result indicates the general variance of five neighbourhood forms is non‐significant in the assessments of the social
satisfacion with educational, health, commcercial and cultural facilities (p>.05, Appendix Table 4.3), which, as discussed above, had all received a positive mean score. On the contrary, the entire group difference is significant at the confidential level 95% in the assessments of the social satisfaction with social welfare, sports facilities, public space, inner surroundings as well as satisfaction with public transport and parking space (p<.05, Appendix Table 4.3).