Using Multiscenario Assessment Framework to Measure Access to Urban Parks for Refuge in Reference to Survival Justice

Abstract

The refuge function of urban parks is regarded as a place of refuge for urban residents after natural or man-made disasters and refers to survival justice. Limited research has given an account of the definition and measurement of the refuge function of urban parks. This study will propose a novel evaluation framework that will comprehensively measure the potential and invisible inequality through the access to parks for residents' refuge and will make a comparative analysis in multiscenarios, respectively from the wall effects, multiscales, different traffic modes, and supply and demand aspects. The results provide several insights that might be of great significance to the adequacy and spatial equality evaluation of urban parks for refuges in cities. The least-cost distance (LCD) model was employed to measure the minimum time cost (MTC) as accessibility for potential and invisible equality analysis. The spatial and statistics comparative analysis in multiscales suggested a considerable inequality in accessibility by different traffic modes to parks for refuging in Wuhan urban center area, China. By assessing whether the MTC for residents that reached the nearest park increased, the results confirmed that wall effect increased the invisible inequality. In particular, the invisible equality caused by wall effect of refuging was relatively greater at a finer scale and more apparent by walking. In addition, the wall effect was related to the socioeconomics of the MTC for residents that reached the nearest refuge park, which was relatively short in medium economic level areas. The findings might remind urban planners to plan and construct urban parks that consider refuge capacity and contribute to reducing the vulnerability of cities, and then help urban residents deal with natural or man-made disasters in future.