Re-Examining Urban Vitality through Jane Jacobs’ Criteria Using GIS-sDNA: The Case of Qingdao, China

Abstract

This study focuses on the assessment of historic city vitality to address increasingly fragmented urban patterns and to prevent the decline of livability in older urban areas. In 1961, Jane Jacobs theorized urban vitality and found the main conditions that were required for the promotion of life in cities: diversity of land use, small block sizes, diversity of buildings with varied characteristics and ages, density of people and buildings, accessibility for all people without depending on private transport, and distance to border elements. Jacobs’ criteria for urban vitality has had an indisputable influence on urban researchers and planners especially in the Anglo-American context. This perspective has influenced the development of New Urbanism and similar planning policies, such as neo-traditional communities and transit oriented development, yet her theories have to be more substantiated in Asia’s developing cities, especially in China’s historic cities. In order to verify the significance of Jacobs’ urban vitality theory in Chinese historic cities, we develop a composite measure of 16 variables of built environment, and we test it using GIS-sDNA in a historic city with an aging population and low-income in Qingdao. A systematic approach to urban spatial analysis allows us to provide a detailed spatial interpretation of a historic city form. The results emphasize that historic cities vitality, far from being homogeneous, followed a multi-centered distribution pattern, which is related to the previous European planning of the region, where a grid-type pattern was more likely to disperse urban vitality. The results can serve as a useful framework for studying the livability and vitality of different areas of the city in different geographical contexts.