Defining Service Areas and Establishing a Multidimensional Evaluation Framework for High-Density City Parks: A Perspective on the Lifeworld of Older People

Abstract

Parks play a crucial role as venues for daily activities for older individuals, making fairness and justice in their services a paramount concern for policymakers. This study developed a multidimensional assessment framework grounded in the lifeworld of older people to evaluate the fairness and justice of park service areas. The proposed multidimensional assessment framework innovatively introduces the chi-shape algorithm, which uses Delaunay triangulation to construct concave packets to accurately define the scope of park services. An empirical study conducted in the high-density city of Macau, which defines and evaluates the service areas of 40 parks, revealed that the delineation of park service areas is influenced by residential building locations and land attributes, resulting in diverse boundary definitions. Among the six indicators, park accessibility and the impact of the transportation environment were relatively weak, whereas population distribution, land use, socioeconomic factors, and the effectiveness of park services had more significant impacts. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of older people’s utilization of parks, providing more targeted recommendations for park planning and updates.