Street vitality and built environment features: A data-informed approach from fourteen Chinese cities

With the increasing demand for liveable cities, efforts to promote high degrees of street vitality have become prevalent in contemporary urban design. Nevertheless, exploring the relationship between intangible street vitality and built environment features remains a challenge. With the help of multi-sourced urban data, a systematic analysis of 14 Chinese cities with both top-down and human-scale viewpoints was developed focusing on morphological, functional, and human-scale features. The hierarchical regression analysis indicates that functional features have the highest impact, followed by morphological and human-scale features. Among functional features, spatial proximity to a primary school and functional mixture have the strongest impact, while high street store consumption levels tend to have negative effects. In terms of morphological features, a high-density built-up environment has the strongest impact. Many human-scale features have positive effects on street vitality; nevertheless, the visible vegetation and sidewalk, which are important indicators of streetscape quality, point to a negative correlation that reflects the mismatch between vitality and quality issues. In short, this data-informed approach provides new insights into street vitality. This study responds to the growing scholarly interest in introducing systemic and scientific thinking into the previously qualitative and intuitive fields of urban design.