Abstract:

The level of urban public service provision directly affects the life quality of residents, and location and allocation of urban public service facilities are an important task of urban planning and development. In recent years, the concept of urban life circle has been paid increasing attention to in China, and various localities have aimed to create a perfect "community life circle" as a key task of urban governance. Using the open source map data and the urban network analysis (UNA) toolbox, this study analyzed the spatial difference of public service facilities in Shahekou District of Dalian City, and measured the number and type of reachable facilities to residents of 90 communities in the district. Then, an overall evaluation of each community was conducted. Finally, the optimal allocation of public service facilities was proposed. The results show that: 1) Public service facilities are unevenly distributed in Shahekou District of Dalian City. There are more facilities on the north side and fewer on the south side, showing a structure of one primary center and six secondary centers. The primary center is around the commercial area of Xi'an Road and the secondary centers are distributed in each subdistrict. 2) There is a large difference in the number of reachable facilities to residents—facilities on the north side of the Malan River are more than that of the south side, and there are more facilities in one or two areas in each subdistrict. 3) There are some differences in types of reachable facilities to residents, and more than 70% of the residents can reach all six types of public service facilities. The number of facility types reachable to residents on the west side of Xibei Road-Xinan Road-Wuyi Road is less than that of the east side. 4) Generally, in various communities reachable facilities are balanced and have small differences. However, there are still some communities that show large internal differences. According to the analysis, whether residents can access the various public service facilities is greatly affected by the distribution of facilities, the barriers of ground objects, and the closed degree of community. At the end of this article, we propose to build 15-minute community life circles with all needed facilities and easy to reach.

Key words: 15-minute community life circle, public service facilities, community governance, urban network analysis (UNA), Dalian City