The Restructure of Amenities in Beijing's
Peripheral Residential Communities
By
Meng Ren
Master of Architecture
Bachelor of Architecture
Tsinghua University, 2011
Tsinghua University, 2013
Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
in Partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of
ARGHNE8
Master in City Planning
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE
OF TECHNOLOLGY
at the
JUN 29 2015
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
LIBRARIES
June 2015
C 2015 Meng Ren. All Rights Reserved
The author hereby grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to distribute
publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part in
any medium now known or hereafter created.
Author
Signature redacted
Department of U an Studies and Planning
May 21, 2015
Certified by
'Signature redacted
Associate Professor Sarah Williams
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Thesis Supervisor
A
Accepted by
Sianature redacted
V
Professor Dennis Frenchman
Chair, MCP Committee
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
The Restructure of Amenities in Beijing's
Peripheral Residential Communities
Evaluation of Planning Interventions Using Social Data as a Major Tool
in Huilongguan Community
By
Meng Ren
Submitted in May 21 to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
in Partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master in City Planning
Abstract
China's rapid urbanization has led to many big metropolises absorbing their fringe rural lands to
expand their urban boundaries. Beijing is such a metropolis and in its urban peripheral, an increasing
number of communities have emerged that are comprised of monotonous housing projects. However,
after the basic residential living requirements are satisfied, many other problems (including lack of
amenities, distance between home and workplace which is particularly concerned with long commute
time, traffic congestion, and etc.) exist. New remedy plans are undertaken to mitigate such problems.
Huilongguan is a typical, representative case of amenity scarcity and improvement dynamic.
The initial aim of this thesis is to investigate whether planning intervention can be evaluated from a
crowdsourcing perspective. Using Huilongguan as a case study, research data are obtained from the
Huilongguan Community Forum and Dazhongdianping website. The addition of amenities, such as
transportation, shopping malls and work zones, is examined to discover how their restructuring affects
the daily lives of residents.
Posts on the Huilongguan Community Forum are extracted and categorized according to a specific
scheme. The distribution of posts is researched to determine the amenities that have drawn the most
attention of residents of this community, as well as the reason. Based on an analysis of sequential
content, the attitudes and opinions of residents with regard to amenities are collected and compared to
show which amenities are the most satisfactory and those that are problematic. Finally, assessments
are made to evaluate amenities from the perspective of users.
Using community forum and public reviews is one approach among numerous others to evaluate
planning intervention. In general, traditional evaluations investigate the outcome of planning at a
certain time. However, since urbanization is a dynamic process, obtaining prolonged and real-time
feedback from different interested parties has become a challenge of traditional evaluations. This
thesis is an attempt at using crowdsourced data to evaluate planning intervention. Moreover, this tool
provides a more transparent and less time-consuming way to analyze first-hand data in order to assess
the outcome of planning. New communities such as Huilongguan are popping up throughout China.
Many of these new communities face similar problems as Huilongguan. By evaluating the quality of
life in Huilongguan, effective methods can be discovered for decision makers and planners to alleviate
such problems.
Thesis Supervisor: Sarah Williams
Thesis Readers: Tunney F. Lee
Acknowledgement
After the defense, I suddenly notice that this will be the end of the life in MIT and a
starting point for another episode. Recalling the time here when I thrilled, struggled, and
enjoyed, all the memory become a treasure that I will always appreciate.
I would like to thank all these people for their help and support:
Thank you Sarah and Tunney, for your patient, guidance, and all of the great ideas you
give me. I will never be able to go this far without your help. You have set me an
example of getting academic achievement with dedication and happiness.
Thank you DUSP community for the caring, inspiration, and fun. I didn't realize how
diverse and passion a community can be before I met you folks. I am proud to be one part
of it.
Thank you Lei Dong, for your help and inspiration of the scripts. Thank you Zhe Wu, for
your tireless help of script and debug. The data grabbing process will be more miserable
without your intelligence and expertise.
Thank you my dear friends, Luxi, Fei and Xinyu, for your friendship, endless support and
accompany, and all the wonderful discussion about Chinese urban issue.
Thank you my parents and my boyfriend, for all the love and support. It is you who
encourage me to pursue my dreams. And it is you who accompany the overstressed
nights during the thesis sprint. Words just can't express my affection.
Table of Content
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................
A cknow ledgem ent ...........................................................................................................................
Table of Content ...............................................................................................................................
1
Introduction..............................................................................................................................
1.1
Research Context ........................................................................................................
1.2
Research Questions and Hypotheses ............................................................................
1.3
Fram ew ork of Study ...................................................................................................
1.4
Significance and Im plications......................................................................................
2
Literature Review ...................................................................................................................
2.1
Evaluation and Criteria of Planning ............................................................................
2.2
The U se of Crowdsourcing in Plan Evaluation ..........................................................
2.3
Things That Have Yet to be Explored ........................................................................
3
Research Objective and Context........................................................................................
3.1
Background of Huilongguan's Developm ent .............................................................
3.2
H uilongguan Plan and H istorical evolution...............................................................
3.3
Population Dynam ic and Bedroom Comm unity.............................................................
3.3.1
D em ographic inform ation ...................................................................................
3.3.2
Spacial m ism atch .................................................................................................
3.4
Arising urban problems in Huilongguan: Work-Residence Separation and amenity
scarcity .......................................................................................................................................
3.4.1
Gaps caused by work-residence separation: traffic.............................................
3.4.2
Com m ercial am enity and public services ..........................................................
3.4.3
Efforts and im provem ents ...................................................................................
4
Research M ethod ....................................................................................................................
4.1
H istorical and contextual analysis ..............................................................................
4.2
Interview s .......................................................................................................................
4.3
Q uantitative analysis on data......................................................................................
4.3.1
H uilongguan Com m unity Forum (hlgnet.com ) .................................................
4.3.2
D azhongdianping (Public Review s)....................................................................
5
D evelopm ent of Job Opportunity......................................................................................
5.1
Introduction.....................................................................................................................
5.2
Data and methods .......................................................................................................
5.2.1
D ata grabbing and processing .............................................................................
5.2.2
Content Categorization ........................................................................................
D ata Analy s .....................................................................................................
5.2.3
5.3
Top Discussions in the Online Forum ........................................................................
5.4
6
6.7
7
Findings ..........................................................................................................................
Comm ercial Amenities and Services .................................................................................
6.1
The Am enity Index ......................................................................................................
6.2
Com parative Evaluation - W ang Jing Area ...............................................................
6.3
Food and Beverage .....................................................................................................
6.4
Leisure and Entertainm ent ..........................................................................................
6.5
Sports & Health ..............................................................................................................
6.6
Public Services................................................................................................................
Findings ..........................................................................................................................
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................
7.1
Research Results .............................................................................................................
3
4
5
7
7
9
10
12
13
13
21
22
24
24
27
30
30
31
32
33
34
34
36
36
36
37
37
39
43
43
45
45
47
51
56
57
59
59
61
62
66
67
69
69
72
72
7.2
7.3
7.4
8
M ajor findings ................................................................................................................
Lim itation and Future Research..................................................................................
Im p lication s ....................................................................................................................
73
75
76
B ibliog rap hy ...........................................................................................................................
77
A ppendix I ........... ..........................
............. ..... ... ... ..... ................
...............................
The most popular posts regarding to employment bases...........................85
85
Appendix 11..............................................................................................
The most popular posts regarding to mass transit...................................................
89
89
1
Introduction
1.1 Research Context
China's Rapid Urbanization
China's rapid urbanization has led to many big metropolises absorbing their fringe rural lands to
expand their urban boundaries. Beijing is such a metropolis and in its urban peripheral, an
increasing number of communities have emerged that are comprised of monotonous high-rise
apartments and six-story slabs. However, after the basic residential living requirements are
satisfied, many other problems exist. These problems include lack of amenities, distance between
home and workplace which is particularly concerned with long commute time, traffic congestion,
and etc. Huilongguan is a typical, representative case of amenity scarcity and improvement
dynamic that involve both planning efforts from top-down mechanism and market-leading
individual behavior.
The Huilongguan Case
Huilongguan ([
iRQ) is a peripheral residential neighborhood in northern Beijing. Located in
Changping District, Huilongguan is approximately 20 km north from Beijing's city center.
Originally a satellite town, Huilongguan has grown to become part of Beijing's extended
metropolis inside the 6th Ring Road. After the year 2000, Huilongguan gradually developed into
a giant cluster of residential neighborhoods. Its east-west length is approximately 6.2 kilometers
while its north-south length is approximately 2 kilometers. During initial planning,
Huilongguan's total area was 11.27 square kilometers; its gross floor area was 850 hectares.
During the late 1990s, Huilongguan's planned population was 300,000, while its actual
population, in early 2000, reached 450,000. Huilongguan Neighborhood has been regarded as
Asia's largest community.
7
Figure 1 Huilongguan's photo, scale and location
While rapid urban construction was taking place in Beijing's old city during the 1990s, the large
inflow of migrants became associated with the increasing population density. Simultaneously,
institutions began to transform with the appearance of a real housing market. Many potential
customers were forced into the market despite lacking sufficient economic means to purchase a
housing unit. This situation led to massive population relocation outside of central Beijing as
well as increased demand for affordable housing.
In order to tackle this issue, in 1998, the Beijing government decided to construct large-scaled
residential neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were mainly comprised of affordable housing in
Beijing's suburbs. Huilongguan was one of these new towns. In 1998, after the initial planning of
the neighborhood by the Municipal Planning Commission, a state-owned developer began to
develop the neighborhood. It was developed parallel with the development of Zhongguancun
Science and Technology Park, a Chinese "Silicon Valley." Massive developments emerged,
mainly catering to the housing demand of science and education personnel, near the early 2000s.
Huilongguan was labelled as a "Bedroom City" because of its massive population relocation and
simplified preliminary planning. For the last decade, the neighborhood has suffered from
work-residence separation as well as subsequent problems, such as long commute time and
traffic congestion. However, in order to ameliorate the work-resident separation, the municipal
government and the local government have been attempting to improve employment allocation
and transport capacity near Huilongguan. They also adjusted new commercial amenities in the
8
neighborhood to accommodate local residents' daily life. The problems have been mitigated to
some magnitude.
The Huilongguan Community Forum
Huilongguan residents have relatively long commute times to work. The long commutes create
compressed time, which in turn causes residents to lose their incentives to establish relationships
with others. To some extent, the Huilongguan Community Forum' (hlgnet) seems to facilitate
social activities. Since the establishment of the Forum's website, in 2000, it now carries more
than 500,000 registered users today. In addition, daily page views are up to 600,000 viewers,
which enables the website to be ranked 20th on Chinese Hottest Online Forum site in 20152.
1.2 Research Questions and Hypotheses
Starting with the initial aim of evaluating planning intervention in peripheral neighborhoods of
Beijing from a crowdsourcing perspective and using social data, each following aim and study
goal will be elevated through the integration of these two research streams. Using Huilongguan
as a case study, research data will be obtained from the Huilongguan Community Forum and
Dazhongdianping website. The addition of amenities, such as transportation, shopping malls and
work zones, will be examined to discover how their restructuring affects the daily lives of
residents. This will help determine if crowdsourced data can help city planners evaluate the
success of urban development and help guide future projects.
The use of social data as a new tool in this investigation will be crucial. Throughout this thesis,
the following three research questions will try to be answered:
1) Can social data be used to evaluate planning strategy and facility quality?
2) How can this tool be used? What are the findings from using this method?
3) What are the limitations and implications of the findings from using this new method? How
2
http://www.hlgnet.com/
http://www.iwebchoice.com/htmi/class_62.shtml?3Months
9
can planners use this tool to create better plans in the future?
Posts on the Huilongguan Community Forum will be a major source of data. They will be
combined with supplementary data on amenities from the Dazhongdianping website. Structured
interviews will also be conducted for the purpose of qualitative analysis. These posts will be
extracted from the community forum and categorized according to a specific scheme. Then,
based on a classification, the distribution of posts on the forum will be researched to determine
the amenities that have drawn the most attention of residents of this community, as well as why
they have drawn the most attention. Based on an analysis of sequential content, the attitudes and
opinions of residents with regard to amenities will be collected and compared to show which
amenities are the most satisfactory and those that are problematic. Finally, an assessment will be
made to evaluate amenities from the perspective of users.
The following three hypotheses will be examined through the above-mentioned analysis:
1)
Social data and content analysis are two of many tools that can be used to evaluate the
planning process for amenities.
2)
Findings can be extracted from the analysis of social data. Additionally, amenities can be
evaluated using this data. These evaluations can reveal the scarcity, partial improvement or
complete adequacy of amenities.
3)
Summary of steps to sharpen these tools.
1.3 Framework of Study
Before planning is evaluated and a new method is explored, a literature review will be provided
in Chapter 2 of this thesis. This literature review will be divided into two aspects, plan evaluation
and the application of crowdsourcing. Over the course of plan creation and evaluation, particular
criteria should be adopted according to the concepts of various plans and social context (Baer,
1997). The use of crowdsourcing in planning provides collective knowledge and stimulates
community empowerment while enabling planners to obtain intelligent and innovative input
(Brabham, 2009). After this, the potential integration of planning and crowdsourcing in China
will be examined.
10
The general context of the development and dynamic evolution of the amenities of Huilongguan
will be explored in Chapter 3. The initial development of this community was rooted in the
expansion of the urban area of Beijing and increasing demand for affordable housing. After
several rounds of adjustments, a plan for Huilongguan was implemented but the development of
amenities was neglected. Following this, specific problems, such as distances between residents
and their workplaces, long commute times and the scarcity of commercial amenities, will be
discussed in order to sort out planning intervention to mitigate such problems.
Along with exploring the first research question, Chapter 4 demonstrates the framework of
methods. Starting with a brief summary of the holistic methodology used for this thesis, detailed
information about the context analysis, interviews and quantitative analysis of social data is
provided. Specifically, this chapter explores the characteristics of the two sources of data, the
Huilongguan Community Forum and Dazhongdianping website, and the reasons why this data is
emphasized. The chapter also summarizes the basic steps of data collection and analysis in order
to provide a general sense of how these tools are applied.
In addition to the second research question, the following Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, evaluate
facilities and amenities, including employment bases and commercial amenities. Data on
employment bases and mass transit systems will be extracted from the Huilongguan Community
Forum and categorized after being processed. The frequency of keywords (i.e. names of
amenities) will then be compared to reveal the focus of netizens and day-to-day influence of
amenities. After this, sentiment analysis will be conducted to determine the satisfaction of
residents with regard to specific amenities. Representative discussions will then be extracted and
summarized to reflect the major concerns of residents in terms of the planning and maintenance
of amenities. In Chapter 6, an index that reflects the level of commercial amenities in
Huilongguan will be established and a comparative evaluation of Huilongguan and Wangjing, a
well-developed neighborhood, will be conducted. Finally, a holistic assessment will be made
after comparing various categories in detail.
In Chapter 7, the research results will be determined by highlighting the findings in the three
previous chapters. The limitations of this research and potential areas for future research will
then be discussed. Finally, the implications of crowdsourcing with regard to better adapting the
11
analysis of social data in order to evaluate planning are highlighted.
1.4 Significance and Implications
Using community forum and public reviews is one approach among numerous others to evaluate
planning intervention. In general, traditional evaluations investigate the outcome of planning at a
certain time. However, since urbanization is a dynamic process, obtaining prolonged and
real-time feedback from different interested parties has become a challenge of traditional
evaluations. This thesis is an attempt at using crowdsourced data to evaluate planning
intervention. Moreover, this tool provides a more transparent and less time-consuming way to
analyze first-hand data in order to assess the outcome of planning.
New communities such as Huilongguan are not only popping up in cities such as Beijing and
Shanghai, but also in many second-tier cities in China. Moreover, many of these new
communities face similar problems as Huilongguan, including insufficient local amenities and
facilities, excessive commute times, traffic congestion, etc. By evaluating the quality of life in
Huilongguan, effective methods can be discovered for decision makers and planners to alleviate
such problems. Some lessons may also be learned by researching future planning and
urbanization.
12
2
Literature Review
This chapter provides a brief review of two related areas, namely, the development and
application of planning evaluations, particularly evaluations of amenities and public facilities in
the context of urbanization in China, and the use of crowdsourced data in the planning process.
However, there is little research that focuses on interdisciplinary areas. This research attempts to
integrate these two areas and examine the potential of crowdsourcing in the evaluation of
planning in China.
2.1 Evaluation and Criteria of Planning
General Evaluation and Criteria of Planning
How is it decided if a plan is good? What criteria are applied when evaluating a plan? Which
tools can be used to assess plans? At first glance, these questions seem to be easy to answer
intuitively. However, such questions have long been discussed, but are still difficult to answer.
As Berke and French point out:
The quality of aplan is difficult to define. Plannersoften differentiate high-qualityplansfrom
low-quality ones, but are hardpressed to explicitly define the key characteristicsofplan
quality. Literatureon planning is surprisinglyscarce when it comes to what constitutes a good
plan. The planningprofession has generally avoided this normative question andfocused
insteadon the methods andprocesses ofplan creation. (Berke and French, 1994, 237-8)
In the context of planning in the United States, the evaluation of planning can be defined in
various ways while several stages of evaluations can be distinguished in the process of creating a
plan. These stages are plan assessment, plan testing and evaluation, critique, research and
professional evaluation and post hoc plan evaluation. Although similar words are used for all of
these stages, identifying who is responsible for an evaluation, when it is conducted and the goals
of an evaluation help to distinguish different types of evaluations (Baer, 1997).
The relationships between the various stages of the process and evaluation of planning are
demonstrated below:
13
Plan Assessment:
Application of criteria for
the plan as embodied in
the document.
Plan Testing and
Evaluation:
Choice of best alternative
or "the plan" by insider
planning team.
Critique
Overall plan critique by
outside critic, with
assorted -even
idiosyncratic- criteria.
4.,
Research and Professional
Evaluation
m
Concerned with professional
improvements in plan, and performed
by insiders or outsiders trained as
planners and researchers.
Evaluation of reality if no
plan had been put in place
Post Hoc Plan Evaluation,
Intended Plan Result or Effect
Reality
Reality
with a plan In place
there had been no plan
(actual result or effect)
(actual result or effect If
Figure 2 Various stages for evaluation in the planning process (adapted from Baer 1997)
It is worth noting that post hoc plan evaluation takes place after a plan is adopted and
implemented while other stages are performed during the creation of a plan. The purpose of this
final stage is to examine if a plan was implemented and, if so, how it performed (Alterman and
Hill, 1978) and its effectiveness (Faludi, 1987). However, this raises two questions: 1) when is it
appropriate to evaluate the outcome?; and 2) to what alternatives should it be compared? Various
permutations of post hoc plan evaluation are described based on comparisons of the real and
intended outcomes of a plan, reality and a null case (if there was no plan) and the differences of
"unanticipated consequences of a plan" (Baer, 1997). In particular, as a post-modem concept of
planning, "dialogue about community" is even more important than physical outcomes.
Moreover, "persuasivenessand communicative quality" is an essential plan quality. The
14
involvement of private consultants also has a positive impact on plan quality (Bunnell and
Jepson, 2011).
Baer (1997) created lists of partial criteria from literature and synthesized them into a composite
list that planning professionals could use as a checklist (Figure 3). Despite this, these criteria are
not definitive, but rather advisory and suggestive. Planners should devise their own criteria
during the creation of a plan and evaluate potential outcomes.
Adequacy of Context
Explain the context and
setting: the what and why
of the document.
"Rational Model" Consideration
Procedural Validity
Show basic planning considerations
based on underlying theoty and its
criteria.
Explain the who and the
how of the plan-making.
Adequacy of Scope
Guidance for Implementation
Show how the plan is
connected to the larger world,
Consider the instruments and the
agencies and persons responsible for
making the plan work.
Approach, Data,
& Methodology
Quality of Communication
Make clear the technical
bases of the plan
all else is necessary for a fair
hearing form others
Clear communication above
Plan Format
Other forms of communication are found in
the plan format itself.
Figure 3 Some suggested criteria for planning assessment (adapted from Baer 1997)
Various Focuses of Plan Evaluation
The criteria of planners vary according to distinguished plan concepts.
Appropriate criteriato evaluate a plan are implicit in the concept that the plan embodies.
Moreover, in reciprocalfashion, the plan's concept is clarifiedonly by consideringthe
criteriaby which it isjudged... Each time a plan is prepared the planners should specify the
criteriaby which they expect it to be evaluated; the effort inevitably sharpens their
understandingof what they are about. (Baer, 1997)
15
Post hoc evaluation emphasizes various criteria. Some scholars believe plans should facilitate the
recreational live of residents. Michalos et al. researched community indicators to measure the
effectiveness of recreational programs (Michalos et al., 2011). Numerous topics, such as
indicators and standards for "parksand outdoor recreation, leisure and its relationshipto
quality-of-life satisfaction, the development of tourism and instruments and sustainability
indicatorsformanaging community-based tourism " and other sustainability issues, are evaluated
to build detailed models and indicator systems. Sugiyama studied the link between recreational
walking and the parameters of open spaces in a neighborhood. The presence of a large,
high-quality park within walking distance of one's home may be more important to promoting
sufficient amounts of walking for health benefits than its mere presence (Sugiyama, 2010).
Others develop criteria related to sustainability and ecology. The presence of a state planning
mandate, mostly applicable to planning in the United States, as well as having a variety of groups
participating in the planning process are key factors that increase overall support for the
sustainable development principles of a plan (Conroy and Berke, 2004). Ning evaluated
affordable housing projects in China based on an ecological housing estate evaluation system.
The analytic hierarchy model evaluates plan outcomes from general planning goals to a detailed
eco-residence plan (including energy-saving design, eco-green space system, water circulation
system, etc.) and 50 detailed indicators (Ning, 2006).
There is a long-held tradition of using quantitative tools to evaluate amenities and assess traffic.
Mandl created an algorithm to compute distances and routes in order to evaluate the average
transportation costs of passengers who use public transportation in cities (Mandl, 1980). A
holistic approach is provided for the development and programming of transportation that
includes sets of methodologies to measure economic efficiency, the impact of a project on land
use and the environment, etc. (Sinha and Labi, 2011).
Cases of Plan Evaluation in the Development of New Towns
Plan evaluation also varies according to different planning systems and socio-economic contexts,
particularly in the development of new towns. Asian scholars who study the evaluation of
amenities pay close attention to problems rooted in the culture and social framework of Asia.
16
In Japan, most new towns are large residential estates that are home to workers who commute to
a parent city. Rapid economic growth since 1960 has resulted in an enormous concentration of
people in the metropolitan regions of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. The supply of public housing
has been strained due to a lack of suitable level land, fragmented land ownership and high prices.
Houses with reasonable rent are now located great distances from city centers (Kiuchi and
Inouchi, 1976).
Because of these circumstances, new towns like Tama were planned and developed. The urban
facilities of Tama, Senri and Senpoku, three new towns, have been compared by collecting
official statistics that measure the level of public facilities and subjective data on satisfaction
from questionnaires. The main problems of Tama include a low-quality living environment and
urban facilities and a heavy financial burden on municipalities (Kiuchi and Inouchi, 1976). After
40 years of development, a new analysis of Tama was conducted and revealed that it was
shrinking. The research of demographic dynamics reflects the failure of the plan for Tama
(Ducom, 2008).
Evaluations of amenities in new towns in Korea show their problems as well. Research by Jun
and Hur, which included criteria of commuting costs, showed that the "leap-frog" development
of new towns built outside the green belt cost more than the "development of contiguous new
towns" (Jun and Hur, 2001). In a study of green space accessibility in new towns in Seoul, an
urban green assessment model was adopted. This model showed that the spatial form and
arrangement of new towns were more influential in determining accessibility (Eom and Lee,
2009).
Going one step further, many scholars have contributed to evaluating the development of new
towns in China. Similar to the situation in Japan, most new towns in China consist of affordable
housing. Scholars have dedicated their work to exploring appropriate criteria and standards to
guide the creation of plans or performing post hoc evaluations of current land use, amenities and
the living quality of residents.
On one hand, research has concentrated on establishing appropriate criteria for built environment.
This includes, but is not limited to, criteria for public facilities and amenities (Min Zhao et al.,
17
2002, Zao et al., 2010 and Dongbo Xu et al., 2012), building forms (Pengfei Wu, 2013) and
modularization (Yanning Lv, 2012), the configuration of open spaces (Ruojun Lin, 2008 and
Yun tan, 2012) and energy-saving technology (Chongbu Gao, 2012, Yuting Liu, 2012).
On the other hand, research has investigated ways to evaluate the level and quality of facilities
and amenities and the evaluation results of specific cases using various methods. Since the lack
of public facilities and commercial amenities is the most pervasive and serious problem in these
new towns, there is a large amount of literature that covers this topic. Some of this literature even
analyzes the case of Huilongguan.
Chenglei Li compares Huilongguan, Wangjing and Fangzhuan, three urban fringe communities
in Beijing, in terms of the distribution and intensity of retail services (Li, 2006). First, he points
out that key features of commercial space are the style, distribution and scale of commerce. He
then analyzes the form and problems of the spatial structure of commerce. The groundbreaking
data from his study led to new standards to evaluate the level of development of a commercial
district, "Commerce Effective Serving Intensity," which give more consideration to the serving
radius of different commercial styles.
18
-
-
Wur - --
-
-_
I - - -
-
-
tW-- - - - -
V7
4/
Z.
7 ---
'En
Figure 4 Retail agglomeration and spacial network (Li, 2006)
Figure 5 Commerce effective serving intensity (Li, 2006)
19
Scholars (Feiran Li et al., 2013) at Peking University led a survey of 550 questionnaires in 2010
on living space in Huilongguan. They evaluated four aspects of living quality, namely,
residential space, working space, shopping space and entertainment space. The results showed
that, over the previous decade, this large community had played an important role in the
formation of residential suburbanization and the decentralization of leisure and shopping space.
Suburbanites had a strong ability to deal with the challenges of long-distance commutes between
their homes and work places. From this study, planners learned that plans for future peripheral
communities should fully consider the connection between work clusters and public
transportation sites.
Figure 6 Comparation of Circles of Entertainment Activities in Huilongguan During 10 Years (Li et
al., 2013)
Other literature echoes similar problems that Huilongguan faced in its early stages, including
distances between home and work and the scarcity of amenities. These problems were reported
in the news, which drew widespread attention and triggered extensive discussions (Shijiao Zhu,
2004, Yan Xing, 2005, Guoqiang Zhai, 2007 and Tan Xu, 2009).
Summary
Based on general plan evaluation typology in the United States and cases of plan evaluation in
the development of new towns in China during its rapid urbanization, the methods and criteria of
plan evaluation are varied. As Baer (1997) argues, planners should establish their own criteria
during the creation of plans and evaluate potential outcomes.
20
-
Most, if not all, cases of evaluation show that a form of "criteria emphasis - methods
evaluation results" has been inherited. Research, particularly that involving Huilongguan,
provides evidence of the scarcity of public facilities and commercial amenities in the early stages
of the development of a community. However, only a small portion of this research follows up
on dynamic outcomes of planning remedies. Furthermore, plenty of time and energy was
available to conduct questionnaires (Feiran Li et al., 2013) and connect groundbreaking data (Li,
2006) as part of existing comprehensive analyses. It is necessary to discover new evaluation
tools that are less time-consuming and able to track dynamic development.
2.2 The Use of Crowdsourcing in Plan Evaluation
"Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting
contributions from a large group of people, particularly from an online community, rather than
from traditional employees or suppliers" (Wikipedia). Brabham (2012) points out that
widespread Internet access and the increasing use of mobile terminals have made crowdsourcing
possible.
Defined as "an online, distributedproblem-solving andproduction model that leverages the
collective intelligence of online communities to serve specific organizationalgoals,"
crowdsourcing must include the following elements: "1) an organizationthat has a task it needs
performed; 2) a community (crowd) that is willing to perform the task voluntarily; 3) an online
environment that allows the work to take place and the community to interactwith the
organization;and 4) mutual benefits for the organizationand community. "(Brabham, 2012)
Crowdsourcing has been used in the business, private and public sectors. The amount of
literature on the use of crowdsourcing in the public sector, such as policy advocacy,
e-government, e-democracy, etc., has increased (Bott and Young 2012). The epidemic of social
media has facilitated virtual collaborative environments where netizens interact, share
information, organize activities, solve problems, co-create value and improve innovation (Vreede
et al., 2013).
Crowdsourcing benefits both organizations and the community because of its unique
characteristics. These include: 1) the low cost of sharing and transacting information, which
21
stimulates and inspires active audiences to coordinate activities beyond the existing formal
hierarchy (Brabham, 2013); 2) non-expert knowledge is collected, which benefits the planning
process in general, and planners are able to break from traditional mindsets and find creative
solutions (Van Herzele, 2004); and 3) crowdsourcing encourages crowd wisdom. Surowiecki
(2005) points out that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligentand
often smarter than the smartestpeople within them."
Most uses of crowdsourcing focus on participatory planning. In terms of its transition from
for-profit use to public use, a successful crowdsourcing business model can allow citizens to
participate in the planning process for projects, thus providing collective knowledge and
stimulating community empowerment (Brabham, 2009). Crowdsourcing is used to increase the
transparency of the survey process (Evans-Cowley, 2010) when collecting input from the
community and facilitates community dialogue. Moreover, crowdsourcing is used to deal with
crises. For example, it helps with tracking, reporting and coordinating relief efforts in the event
of a natural disaster (e.g. Haiti, Pakistan) or war. Crowdsourcing is being used in various ways
within the context of international development.
2.3 Things That Have Yet to be Explored
Countless papers have been written on plan evaluation since the 1980s from different
perspectives. However, traditional theories and methods limit themselves in terms of plan
outcomes and high time and human costs. On the other hand, the use of crowdsourcing in
planning mainly focuses on community planning. Its features, which include a low cost of
sharing and transacting information, ability to connect bottom-up input and collective
intelligence, show that it has the potential to be used in other areas.
Additionally, the use of crowdsourcing in planning seems to illuminate a method for plan
evaluation that provides first-hand, dynamic and more transparent and innovative data with
which to evaluate the outcomes of a plan.
Moreover, there is practically zero research related to the rapid urbanization of China. Given the
fact that social media is becoming more and more prevalent, the number of new towns (or
peripheral neighborhoods) being developed is increasing and civic awareness is rising,
22
crowdsourcing will be a key approach to planning in the future. It is high time to explore the use
of crowdsourcing in plan evaluation in China.
Therefore, this research will contribute to interdisciplinary areas of plan evaluation and
crowdsourcing in the context of urban areas in China.
23
3 Research Objective and Context
Huilongguan's development is deeply rooted in the development of Beijing's historical and
social background in recent decades. Its facilities and amenities, including employment bases,
mass transit, and commercial amenities emerged due to its particular social economic and
demographic background. Therefore, by understanding so, the planning evaluation, specifically,
analysis of residents' opinions regarding amenities can then embed itself in a profound historical
and demographical context.
3.1 Background of Huilongguan's Development
The history of the development of Huilongguan is based on the social constructs of Beijing's
expansion. The 1990s, Beijing saw a large inflow of migrants, which was associated with an
increased population density. The central city suffered a scarcity of available land. At the same
time, social institutional transformation started to be conducted, when housing commoditization
appeared. This situation caused many residents to settle outside Beijing's centre in order to find
affordable housing.
Huilongguan's development is rooted in the following three historical and social contexts.
1.
Increasing Demand of Quality Housing
Since the 1980s, the urban population became increasingly concentrated in Beijing's central city
because of rapid economic development and improved construction standards. According to
research on the recent evolution of Beijing's urban population, in 1998 the total population in
central Beijing grew to 2.65 million and reached 2.86 million in 2002 (Jingwen Wang and Qizhi
Mao, 2010).
Rapid growth of population and vehicle number in central Beijing had led to excessive density of
urban functions. Furthermore, there has been an increasingly heavy burden on urban housing,
transportation, amenity, and environment. Consequently, these burdens have resulted in a myriad
of urban issues, such as deficient living areas, high housing prices, traffic congestion, air
pollution, etc. In the 1990s, in order to optimize land resources, the municipal government began
24
to move populations from central Beijing to suburban areas.
Urban peripheral areas provide advantages due to their lower prices and improved environments.
Furthermore, they have become hotspots for housing development (Zhengran Lu, 2007). Some
citizens focused their sights on suburban areas for the sake of quality living environments or real
estate investments. In 2006, the urban population in central Beijing dropped to 2.07 million,
while the suburban population jumped from 4.93 million of 1998 statistic to 7.34 million; this
was a growth rate of 56.82%. Among them, Changping's population sharply increased from 0.46
million to 0.83 million, with a growth rate of 80.43% (Lu, 007).
2.
Transition of Housing Policy and Strategy
In Socialist China before the 1980s, "housing was treatedas a welfare provision to which
everybody was entitled and was ideally intended to be distributedaccordingto aformal
definition of a minimum requirementand a maximum entitlement of space per person" (Andrusz,
1984: 15). However, in reality housing was not available for such a distribution. Its allocation
was actually based on such criteria as occupation, administrative rank,' job performance, loyalty
and political connections and was "at the discretionof housing authoritiesat various levels of
government or work units, who made the most of their control of this public resource" (Dimaio,
1974; Underhill, 1976).3
During the late 1980s and 19902 China's housing market witnessed a housing commoditization
reform and transition. At the beginning of 1988, China's central government held the first
National Housing Reform Conference in Beijing. At the conference, the State Council's Housing
Reform Steering Group released a document to announce overall housing reform
implementation.
In mid-June of 1998, the National Housing Reform and Construction Conference decided to
continue the reform of urban and rural housing distribution systems. Additionally, it was decided
to build a new multi-level housing supply system consisting mainly of affordable housing. These
decisions were made in order to meet the various housing requirements from deferent income
3 ZHOU Min and LOGAN John R. Market Transition and the Commodification of Housing in Urban China
25
groups and accelerated the housing commoditization. In this context, Huilongguan was designed
to be one of the initial, affordable pilot housing projects.
3.
A New Round of Strategic Adjustment of Urban Spacial Structure
Faced with Beijing's concentric urban sprawl and constantly aggravating urban issues,
development and construction of urban peripheral complexes became key elements of Beijing's
strategic plan of spacial structure. "Beijing City Master Plan (2004-2020)" schematically
adjusted the spacial layout that changed the original single-centre urban sprawl circumstance.
This master plan involved building an urban spacial structure of "two axes, two corridors, and
multi-centres" and a metropolitan structure of "central city -new town -town." In the plan, central
Beijing was planned to be the kernel area, which was embraced by greenbelt and ten peripheral
groups.
As an important component of the Qinghe Peripheral Group, Huilongguan was planned to be a
large-scaled residential community that also considered commercial services (such as dining and
retail), green spaces, and light industry. In accordance with the 2004 master plan, Changping
District's government formulated the "Changping Newtown Master Plan (2005-2020)," in which
Huilongguan Neighborhood was planned to be
"An urbanperipheralgroup mainly comprised of affordable housing that provide housing to
central city's relocatedpopulation. Its plan should improve the city function with commercial
amenity.
26
4
Figure 7 Distribution of fringe groups in the 1992 Master Plan and the 2004 Master Plan
3.2 Huilongguan Plan and Historical evolution
In April 1995, the Beijing Municipal Institute of City planning and Design (BICP) compiled the
HuilongguanArea Long-term Plan. This plan schemed to develop a residential neighbourhood
whose total land area was 26 square kilometres. This included an isolated green space of 13.2
square kilometres, and the planned construction area was 9.8 square kilometres. According to the
plan, the area was bounded by an urban railway ring to the south, Huilongguan South Road to
the north, Jingzang Highway to the west, and Huoying Village to the East. Planned population
was 15 million (1.53 million / km).
The HuilongguanArea Regulatory Plan (Land Use Plan) of 1997 expanded the construction
area and planned population. In 1998, in order to "adapt to the development of affordable
housing circumstances and characteristics," the BICP adjusted the Regulatory Plan and partially
altered the land use configuration to cut down industrial and infrastructural land use, while
increasing residential use and green space. Afterwards, a sequence of detailed site plans were
formulated and implemented to guide subsequent development during the time between late
1998 and 2002.
In 1997, following the BICP's initial neighbourhood plan, the Beijing Tianhong Group, a
state-owned estate developer, firstly began to develop the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood
27
was planned along with the development of Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park. Near
the early 2000s, massive developments emerged when phase one and phase two constructions
were launched. Housing was catered to education and science personnel.
Figure 8 Huilongguan's Historical Evolution
The first project phase began in 1997. It included the first batch of affordable housing. In 2000,
the second project phase started to be developed.
It included affordable housing units of
multi-story slabs in a FAR of 1.6 and a sale price of 2600 Yuan/sq. meters. Phase three to phase
seven were then successively developed until 2008.
According to the plan, most commercial and public amenities were allocated surround "the Great
Ten Mile Boulevard." However, amenity development as well as infrastructure, such as external
traffic arteries, surprisingly fell behind residential development. By the end of 2006, when
majority of the work in the first two phases of the residential project were accomplished, only
part of the commerce in phase one was developed, not to mention the amenity during phase two.
Indeed, during that time, the amount of amenities and locations were still under research and
adjustment. Meanwhile, several planned parks had construction delays as well. The initial plan
didn't arrange any scaled business or industry except for some pre-existing manufacturing estates.
Thereby, the neighbourhood, as developed in the initial plan, did not have a live work balance.
(Yin Wang, Director of Detailed Planning Department of Beijing Municipal Institute of City
planning and Design)
28
....
...
....
Planningof amenity should consider the certain situation of Huilongguan Community. In
1996, the Beijing municipalgovernmentformulated the strategicplan to change the
agriculturalland of North Suburb Farm and adjacentgreenbelt to residentialuse. In 2000, the
government executed the, 4th Document of 1997, and calculatedthe current land use using
economic equilibrium. It plans to use 10 to 20 years to implement the plan, which is mostly
comprisedof six-story slabs and smallportion of high-rise apartments. In 1998, the building
type was confirmed as affordable housing.
At that time, the Great Ten Mile Boulevard was already constructed, however, without
essential undergroundmunicipalpipelines. Consideringthat the street was not conducive to
living, it then was planned to be commercialfacilities. land use area was estimatedby
"nationalstandardsof amenity" in the plan process, including residentialuse, industrialuse
and commercial use in term of land use plan, but the plan didn't define a certain location of
any commercial centre. Nowadays citizens demand of green space, public space and outdoor
sport space has shot up. The significance of culturaland recreationalspace in Huilongguan's
plan is progressively explicit. We (BICP) suggested to remainingthe land use andplan of
Huilongguan'scentral area as well as adjust the land use along the Great Ten Mile
Boulevard
In term of internal transportation, a light rail was planned for construction along the Great Ten
Mile Boulevard. However, the plan was scrapped when subway line 13 was established. In 2004,
the light rail line #13 was constructed and connected Huilongguan neighbourhoods into the
network of Beijing's public transit. This linked Huilongguan and the central city, making them
more inseparable. Following the city's expansion, in 2005, the new General-planningofBeijing
(2004-2020) replaced "satellite town" with "new town" while dovetailed Huilongguan
Neighbourhoods with the central city of Beijing.
29
.......
.............
AfttMAS h""
COMMWCW was
0
Pubk3wV"
40. ow
*A
VOW
-A
37-1
L
a
Ak
Figure 9 (Left) Distribution of Affordable Housing and amenity,
(Right) New construction of Line 13
3.3 Population Dynamic and Bedroom Community
3.3.1 Demographic information
Considering Huilongguan's initial targets, population presents a distinct feature. Residents in the
4
neighbourhoods, generally speaking, are mostly young migrant professionals . According to a
2010 survey conducted by researchers in Peking University, 68% of observations were young
folks that were less than 32 years old and 64.5% of them have received higher education. Due to
China's One Child Policy and age distribution, family size in the neighbourhoods tend to be
small: 65% of all observations came from two to three person families. One notable phenomenon
5
is that only 47% of residents in the survey have Beijing Hukou , while 62% of populations have
Hukou in the greater Beijing area according to 2013 data from the National Bureau of Statistics
of China. One specific process of intra-urban migration underlies this particular demographic
4 People work and live in other city other than hometown, but don't have Hukou of the city they currently live. (also see footnote
5 A hukou is a record in the system of household registration required by law in China. A household registration record officially
identifies a person as a resident of an area and includes identifying information such as name, parents, spouse, and date of birth.
Because of its entrenchment of social strata, especially as between rural and urban residency status, the hukou system is often
regarded as a caste system of China. In big metropolis like Beijing, hukou also means the permit to obtain scarce resources for
local residence, such as access to vehicle license, permit to buy a house, and qualification of children's primary education.
30
composition.
3.3.2 Spacial mismatch
Table 1 Residents' occupation in Huilongguan
In term of residents' occupation, a large amount of
Huilongguan residents work in the IT field or
Information technology 17.80%
relative fields (Table 1). Though IT jobs tend to
Education
7.00%
require relatively flexible working locations, the
Marketing
5.80%
singular planning of Huilongguan Neighborhood
Finance & management 4.80%
makes the area distracted from engagement locations. Service
In the neighborhoods, residents hardly work within
Public Officials
distance.
walkable
Media
tucents
Comparing geographic distribution of current
Retired
residents' homes and their job locations in 2003
< 3.00%
< 3.00%
< 3.00%
.).UUYO
< 3.00%
(Figure 7) proves that locations and engagement locations were somehow fitted. However, in the
last decade, only 20% of current residents changed their jobs. Simply put, the majority of
residents' living and working place separated after they moved into Huilongguan. Even for the
closest IT industrial area, Zhongguancun, the distance is still about 7 miles. For residents who
work in the CBD area, the commute distance can exceed 15 miles. This spacial mismatch
resulted in severe issues.
31
IT1
IW4--
Figure 10 (left) CurrentHuilongguan residents' home location in 2003,
(Right) Current residents' job location in 2003 (Li et al., 2013)
3.4 Arising urban problems in Huilongguan: Work-Residence Separation and amenity
scarcity
Because of the movement of population to the exurban areas and the preliminary planning with
simple urban function, Huilongguan was labelled as a "Bedroom City." As mentioned in
previous chapter, Huilongguan was planned as residential area which contains small part of
commercial land use. However, since industrial and infrastructural land use had been cut down,
the only job opportunity in the neighbourhood is couples of existing manufacturing industry.
(R4) I moved here because old city renewal and relocation. They (the government and developer)
asked me to live here, so I live here. Even though here is the Youth EntrepreneurshipParkfew
people work here. This road is usuallyfull of desolation.
Every day, residents travel dozens of miles from the neighbourhood to central city. This
work-residence separation raises subsequent problems such as long commute time and traffic
congestion.
Moreover, the work-residence separation isn't the only problems of the community. Amenity
scarcity constrains quality life in the neighborhood as well. This problem also comes from the
neglect of preliminary planning, when facility and amenity quota was arbitrarily determined
32
without any matched plan of commercial development.
However, the municipal government and the local government have been attempting to improve
employment allocation and transport capacity near Huilongguan in order to ameliorate
work-resident separation. And they programmed new public facilities within the neighborhood to
accommodate daily demand. The problems have been mitigated to some magnitude.
3.4.1 Gaps caused by work-residence separation: traffic
On the one hand, work-residence separation results in large transportation demand. When this
demand cannot be satisfied by the existing transportation condition infrastructure in a newly
established neighbourhood like Huilongguan, serious traffic congestion emerges.
In Huilongguan neighbourhoods, approximately 300,000 people need to commute via limited
couples of arteries and the light rail line #13. Existing roads are not equipped to handle such
traffic flows during peak times, while LRL carrying capacity is insufficient as well. It is common
to see lines of cars crawling in the main entrance roads and the bumper crowds accumulate in the
LRL stations' entrance, waiting to take light rail trains (Figure 11). This traffic congestion also
attributes to air pollution and burdens Beijing's already fragile environment.
Figure 11 Traffic congestion in Huilongguan
On the other hand, there is a trade-off between housing price and commute cost that includes
money and time (Figure 12). Due to the municipal's subsidy, Beijing's public transit system is
cheap. However, the average commute time in Beijing is 1.3 hours, and in Huilongguan, most
people's daily commute takes roughly about two or three. . This frustrating time cost
33
tremendously impacts the living quality of Huilongguan residents. As a result, many people
choose to move out after their income increases, which the preceding population analysis
dynamic in Huilongguan indicates.
W
k
Soacial cfstribu*n of w lingness to Day
Wt-er the
F
tra sty
Figure 12
Are
the cal
ard sub%4,s
distribt
ty
sp aws
ceWy TuPcrbs
the spacial distribution of WTP in a city
3.4.2 Commercial amenity and public services
"Nowadays, it is convenient to buy daily necessities. However, I must go to central city for
important or deluxe consumption. At ordinarytimes, my husbandand I always work overtime
and come back home late. Thereby, we don't have time for shopping in the neighborhood
Besides, there is literally no placefor shopping." (Zhu, 2004)
An interview ten years ago revealed the scarcity of public facilities and amenities at the early
stage of the neighborhood's development. The amenity development fell far behind the rapid
construction of housing projects in Huilongguan. Lots of news reported this situation, and even
lead to broad discussion of amenity development for affordable housing communities.
3.4.3 Efforts and improvements
During the last 10 years, in order to tackle work-resident separation, the municipal government
and the local government have attempted to improve the job and traffic conditions near
Huilongguan. First, new job opportunities have been introduced near the neighbourhoods. For
example:
34
1411-1- - -
___M
__
- - __ I .- -I-
__ - -
-
- - - - __ -
-
- - -
-
- -
-
_-MMMMM -2 - -
- I -
,
-
- __
- -I
____
___
-
1
These industry parks, at some level, provide new job locations for residents in the
neighbourhoods, but the preliminary plan doesn't leave sufficient land stock for commercial and
office development, which restricts the improvement for a multi-functional district.
Also, a number of new transportation infrastructure constructed in the past 10 years, which aim
to tackle the traffic congestion and reduce the commuting time. For example, according to the
Beijing Rail Transport Construction Plan, 3 subways/ LRL run across the neighbourhoods: Line
13 was constructed in 2004, line 8 was constructed in 2012, and Changping line will open in
2015. Also, new BRT lines started running from the CBD to Huilongguan (Figure 13). And, an
overpass was built in the most congested area.
Detailed planning interventions will be discussed in the following chapters.
~~4k!
Figure 13 Subway system in Beijing Rail Transport Construction Plan
35
4 Research Method
To provide a comprehensive assessment of the amenities, such as e new construction of light rail
lines and addition of employment bases, a mix of several methodologies are employed. This
includes qualitative methods such as contextual and historical analysis, in-depth interview, and
semi-structured interview, as well as a quantitative analysis of website data. Based on findings
using these methodologies, a set of planning principles and recommendations are formulated,
which then could be either applied to the development of new towns or to mitigation effort of
China's current bedroom communities.
4.1 Historical and contextual analysis
This thesis begins with contextual and historical analyses of the development of Huilongguan
Neighbourhood. These analyses track the development from economic and social contexts, the
neighbourhood's planning process and evolution, demographic data of the site, existing zoning,
amenity allocation, emerged urban problems, as well as local residents' opinion and satisfaction
on different amenities.
4.2 Interviews
Interviews were conducted through face-to-face and phone communication, which includes both
in-depth interviews and semi-structure interviews. Interviews with city planning experts and
professionals last about one hour. One interview was conducted with Yin Wang, the Director of
Detailed Planning Department of Beijing Municipal Institute of City planning and Design
(BICP). During the late 1990s, Wang's team conducted major efforts of the master plan and land
use plan of Huilongguan. The other interview was with a current SPURS Fellow and associate
professor from School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, Ying Wang, whose research and
teaching concentrate on local community development both in the central city and in fringe areas
of Beijing. The focus was put on urban governance of housing development.
The average interview duration with local residents was 30 minutes, varying from 15 to 40
minutes. All interviews were conducted from December 2014 to March 2015.
36
The summary of interviewees is listed as follows.
Table 2 Summary table of interviewees
Planning
Professional
Residents/ Tenants
Age
Name
Code
Yin Wang
Ying Wang
RI
range
51-56
R2
R3
R4
R5
31-35
31-35
26-30
26-30
R6
19-25
R7
31-35
R8
R9
31-35
41-50
RIO
26-30
R 11
60-70
R 12
R13
19-25
19-25
R14
26-30
R 15
R16
19-25
26-30
R17
19-25
R18
R 19
R20
R21
R22
R23
36-40
19-25
19-25
26-30
26-30
36-40
R24
R25
60-70
R26
R27
R28
19-25
41-50
41-50
60-70
Gender Occupation
male
female
female
male
female
female
male
female
female
male
female
female
female
female
female
male
female
male
male
male
staff quarter
security guard
restaurant manager leasehold tenement
commodity
IT engineer
high school
affordable housing
high school
affordable housing
commercial model leasehold tenement
leasehold tenement
small business
commodity
engineer
IT
restaurant manager leasehold tenement
staff quarter
doorkeeper
welfare house
retired
housewife
college student
housewife
HR manager
graduate student
college student
univerty faculty
male
male
female
IT engineer
product engineer
IT engineer
IT engineer
housewife
male
male
male
female
male
retired
retired
shop assistant
restaurant manager
IT engineer
4.3 Quantitative analysis on data
4.3.1 Huilongguan Community Forum (hlgnet.com)
37
housing type
leasehold tenement
college dormitory
leasehold tenement
leasehold tenement
college dorm itory
college dormitory
affordable housing
affordable housing
commodity
leasehold tenement
affordable housing
leasehold tenement
atTordable housing
affordable housing
leasehold tenement
commodity
affordable housing
Resource Data
Because of long commute time and compression of personal life, residents in Huilongguan lose
their incentive to establish relationships with others due to compression of personal time. The
Huilongguan Community Forum 6 (i.e. hlgnet) seems to promote social activities to some degree.
Since 2000, the website has increased to more than 500,000 registered users. In addition, the
daily page views are up to 600,000, which enables the website to be ranked 20th in the Chinese
Hottest Online Forum site in 20157. According to Alexa's statistics, the community forum's
bounce rate ("Percentage of visits to the site that consist of a single page view") reaches 49.60%
and daily page views per visitor reaches 8.86, which indicates a relatively high active agreement
.
of its users8
The emergence of the community forum reveals the internal desire for favourable neighbourhood
relationships and improved environments. Most forum topics are related to residents' daily life.
Netizens performance is especially active under topics such as hot news, built-environment
proposals, traffic congestion complaints, children's education, inter-league sport games, and
dining plans.
(R5) Manyfriends of mine use the hignet. It is a community forum that helps us to get
everyday information. For example, I often search and use the group-buying dealsfrom hlgnet,
and discuss my child's education situationon it. It really accommodates my life in
Huilongguan.
Social capital is the mutually beneficial resources derived from the coordination and
cooperation between individuals and social networks. Based on social capital theory, "By
analogy with notions ofphysical capitaland human capital--toolsand trainingthat enhance
individualproductivity-'socialcapital'refers to features of social organizationsuch as
networks, norms, and social trust thatfacilitate coordination and cooperationfor mutual benefit"
( Putnam 1995). Social capital "refersto the collective value of all 'socialnetworks' and the
6
http://www.hignet.com/
7 http://www.iwebchoice.com/html/class 62.shtml?3Months
8
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hlgnet.com#?
38
inclinationsthat arisefrom these networks to do thingsfor each other" (Simon and Schuster,
2000).
Hlgnet has notably affected the accumulation and production of social capital of the entire
Huilongguan community, respectively by networks of civic engagement, norms of reciprocity,
and trust (Liu, 2005). It develops a new network of civic engagement through catalyzing various
entities such as property owners committee, sports clubs, and grassroots charity activities. It also
builds the norms of reciprocity by providing a forum for community input, structuring dialogue
among different stakeholders and boosting right-preserving campaigns. Furthermore, it
establishes real-life community trust through.
Because of The Huilongguan Community Forum is selected as a major resource of data in
following analysis, in particular for analysis of job opportunity and massive transit. This is due to
the fact that representativeness from hlgnet as well as its positive influences on community social
capital building.
In this thesis, the word "post" is used for publishing a forum message and "reply" as a comment
message on the aforementioned post. Since the database of hlgnet doesn't tag replies when
conducting queries, "message" is used as a general term covering both posts and replies.
Data Collection and Analysis
The data was gathered by submitting queries like "Zhongguancun Life Science Park" and
"subway line 8" to the Huilongguan Community Forum search interface. Data was extracted not
only from search page results, but also from detailed message content of each post's hyperlink.
Then messages are categorized and counted by frequency. A content analysis examines whether
such amenities ofjob opportunities and massive transportation projects a positive affection on
local residential life. Detailed analysis will be discussed in following two chapters.
4.3.2 Dazhongdianping (Public Reviews)
Resource Data
Why using Dazhongdianping to analyze commercial amenity instead of Huilongguan
39
-
, , - -L
--
--
-
-
.
-
I
-
-
-MMMMMMMNW- -
-
-
- I
Community Forum?
As mentioned before, hlgnet has numerous posts relevant to amenities, such as dinning plans and
sports venues. However, when sifting through these kinds of messages, one may surprisingly
find the fact that almost all of the messages are trivial and uncategorized. For example, the
following post includes a typical group of messages. A netizen said that, "After seeing this piece
of news, I am so hungry now!" The post and all eight replies are under this structure:
am hungry too! only had two buns for dinner. I've already been hesitating whether to by a
grilled calamaior a pancake for 20 minutes.
I
I think you can have both calamari and pancake.
It is too late, there won't be any vendors selling pancakes! If you have calamari at
home, consider making it by yourself!
Hahhh! Already had calamari!
Bad news! Grill vendors may sell calamari with illegal food additive.
(r-l)
(r-2)
(r-3)
(r-4)
(r-5)
Don't seduce me! I want pancakes too!
(r-6)
Ten years ago there is a clean and delicious pancake vendor in Anding Bridge. Then it was
prohibited soon. So sad.
Foreign countries have legitimate food trucks. Why they are not allowed in China?
(r-7)
(r-8)
Figure 14 Structure of an online message example
First, because messages on hlgnet lack any direct geographic information like Facebook, and
netizens' activities may be distributed throughout the city, it is difficult to decide whether the
activity mentioned in the message occurred within the neighbourhood. In the above example,
only r-1, r-3, and r-7 contain specific geographical information, which indicates that there are
temporary vendors selling pancakes near a Huilongguan resident's home. However, r-4 and r-5
are not informative enough to infer netizens' opinion regarding a specific vendor in
Huilongguan.
Second, the data is uncategorized while names of commercial amenities are heterogonous. For
example, as mentioned before, Huilongguan had been notorious for its scarce commercial
amenities, such as restaurants. However, without a categorized structure, information spreading
so widely that a single query of "restaurants" retrieves limited information, while messages only
40
containing restaurants' particular names are neglected like the above example.
Third, even if all useful messages are collected, the information they carry is too trivial. The
inference regarding the grill and pancake vendor lacks evidence, such as whether the restaurant's
service is sufficient to support the lives of residents or whether netizens hold positive attitude
toward the restaurant. Furthermore, this kind of analytic process is a multi-disciplinary problem
that may involve machine learning or natural language processing, which falls beyond this thesis'
research scope.
Therefore, new data resources that have both identifiable geographic information as well as
categorized structure are searched for. Dazhongdianping is selected as an alternative data
resource to conduct commercial amenity analysis.
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Figure 15 The searching interface of Dazhongdianping
41
Data Collection and Analysis
Dazhongdianping9 ("Public reviews" as its English translation) is a Yelp-like crowd-sourced
review network about local businesses in the Chinese market. The website was established in
2003. By the end of 2014, it already covered 300 cities in China, with service registered for over
4 million users. In metropolises like Beijing, this website provides very convincing coverage.
DZDP's search interface allows users to search and retrieve business information according to
service category and location. The site's front page provides 13 types of services (Food, Movies,
Entertainment, Hotels, Tourism, Beauty, Bridal, Parenting, Shopping, Sports, Daily Service,
House and Home, and Automobile). Each category includes different subcategories. For instance,
in the "Food" category lists 25 different food genres.
A specific area can be searched and the
website will filter out the services that are accessible in this area. For every query, the website
returns a number of accessible services in different category. For example, searching "Food" in
Huilongguan Neighbourhood, the website directs the user to a webpage showing the number of
each "food" genre that is accessible in Huilongguan.
By calculating amenity amount and distribution in various genres, this thesis generates a general
sense of amenity level among wide range of amenities from restraints to recreational venues.
In
order to make comparisons to analogous case neighbourhoods, an index of amenity is applied to
normalize it. Along with input from interviews of residents, the evaluation of current commercial
amenity is concluded. Detailed analysis will be discussed in Chapter Seven.
9 http://www.dianping.com/
42
5 Development of Job Opportunity
5.1 Introduction
During the last 10 years, the municipal government and the local government attempted to
improve the job condition near Huilongguan in order to tackle work-resident separation and to
boost local economy. New job opportunities have been introduced in and around the
neighbourhoods; majority of these employment bases are high-tech R&D campuses that rely on
industrial agglomeration and expansion of Zhongguancun Science Park and Universities
(Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beihang University and etc.). Their basic information
is listed as follows.
Figure 16 Job Opportunity distribution near Huilongguan
43
101. The Zhongguancun Life Science Park
Was planned to be a high-tech campus that is mainly comprised of research and development of
life sciences, business incubators, testing and producing, product appraisal, biotechnological
project publication, venture investment, international communication, and personnel training.
o
Phase #1: Construction: October 2011; Land area: 130.5 hectares.
o
Phase #2: Under construction; Land area: 122 hectares.
102. Shangdi IT Industry Base
Is an integrated, high-tech industrial park led by the electronic information industry. Today, it is
a fully equipped enterprise gathered campus that contains research and development, production,
management, training, and services.
In order to promote the industrialization of high-tech
achievements and enterprises' internationalization, the base focuses on the development of
computer science, communications, mechatronics, biotechnology, and other high-tech
technology.
o
Southern District: Construction: 2000; Land area: 181 hectares.
o
North District: Construction: 2004; Land area: 51.1 hectares.
104. Beijing International Information Industry Base
In virtue of the proximity of Zhongguancun Science Park, this project focuses on attracting the
world's top 500 enterprises; this includes well-known domestic and foreign enterprises located in
the park. The information industry is the leading industry in the park. It includes software,
electronic products, with synergetic development of environmental protection, biomedical, and
other high-tech enterprises.
o
Phase #1: Construction: 2008; Land area: 63 hectares.
o
Phase #2: Under construction; Land area: 79.2 hectares.
44
121. Er'bozi Industry Park
planned to be demolished in future (timeline: unknown)
131. Sanyi Industry Park
The industrial park's products include construction machinery, piling machinery, road
construction machinery, cranes, and 25 other categories. In particular, the leading product is the
rotary drilling rig, which is ranked first in China's market share. The park is currently China's
largest spin drilling rig manufacturing base.
Construction time: 2012; land area: 34 hectares.
132. Hongfu Industry Park
It integrated industrial incubators and residential communities. Construction time: 1996.
These industrial parks, at some level, provide new workplaces for residents in the
neighbourhoods, as well as facilitate development of third industrial businesses by providing
potential consumers. However, the preliminary plan doesn't leave sufficient land stock for
commercial and office development, which restricts the improvement for a multi-functional
district.
5.2 Data and methods
5.2.1 Data grabbing and processing
First, a set of queries are submitted using all science parks and R&D campus names as keywords
in the community forum's search interface. This returns the user to the search result page, with
several lists of topics posted, user names, reply amounts, view amounts, and publication times.
Because the time spectrum of such science parks and R&D campuses spans from the early 2000
until now, all data since the forum's establishment are retrieved from queries. In total 1991
messages are returned as query result.
Following is the summary of all query keywords and amount of returned messages.
45
Table 3 Summary of query keywords and returned messages
Workplac
e ID
Name
101
Zhongguancun Life Science
Park
101
Zhongguancun Life Science
Shangdi IT Industry Base
102
Shangdi IT Industry Base
103
10301
120
Zhongguancun Changping
Science Park
Beijing International
Information Industry Base
Beijing International
Information Industry Base
Beijing International
Information Industry Base
Changping Industrial Park
121
Erbozi Industry Park
131
Sany Industrial Park
13101
131
Sany industrial Park
13102
I
Sany Industrial Park
13103
131
Sany Industrial Park
13104
132
Beijing Hongfu Industry Park
Beijing youth entrepreneurship
demonstration Park
13201
Xiaotangshan Industry Park
13301
13
133
134
$ YWiA41
1
r--
Th4
1iAI4
1t f t
10202
iLOii
JL
102
104
35
10102
Zhongguancun Life Science
104
Query keyword
li
101
104
l'Ib l H Beijing youth
Keywor
d ID
10101
10103
10201
VHr
10403
f Q1%
12001
[ 'J'T
12101
T-
kI4
[A
-
flI
f F
)i W 'I: V-ri
10501
Life Park
286
Shangdi IT Industry Base
Shangdi Base
19
31
AU TEid Zhongguancun Changping 14
I HkiX
fs rI
'II
10402
Lt,]
F [r
10401
number
keyword_transi
of results
Zhongguancun Life Science 43
Park
Life Science Park
129
Science Park
Beijing International
Information Industry Base
Beijing International
Information Industry Park
Information Park
Changping Industrial Park
Erbozi Industry Park
47
97
629
68
83
Sany Industrial Park
161
Sany Industrial Park
66
Sany Technology Park
81
Sany Heavy Industry
171
Beijing Hongfu Industry
24
T
LI'.d
V4d
entrepreneurship
demonstration Park
Xiaotangshan Industry Park 7
Total
1991
For each of these retrieved forum messages, basic information is extracted including hyperlinks,
topic, user's name, publication time, reply amounts, and view amounts. While the content of
each topic isn't shown in search results, a small script was used to obtain the content of each post
by entering its URL. All 1991 results are then merged with identical query keyword tags, such as
10301, to indicate where the results originated.
Since some forum messages contain more than one keyword in their content, such duplicated
posts are merged, in which the amount of replies and amount of views are replaced with the sum
of the duplicated ones.
46
Subsequently, since the forum uses a word segmentation algorithm'0 ,
searching for keywords
is designed based on string matching instead of machine learning; the returned results include an
amount of irrelevant messages. For instance, when searching "Sany," which is comprised of two
Chinese characters "san" and "yi,' some results emerge because they have those two characters,
but in distinct sentences or even distinct paragraphs. Furthermore, one identical keyword may
indicate another object other than the employment base's name. For example, "Sany Heavy
Industry" also represents the name of a specific stock, so search results may consist of stock
fluctuation. Thereby, after preparatory content analysis, forum messages whose content is
actually irrelevant to the query keywords were rejected. 375 results were left for further analysis.
5.2.2 Content Categorization
First question is to examine what types of messages residents post in the community forum in
response to the aforementioned employment bases. Also, how these types of posts reflect the
influence on residents' real life as well as residents' attitudes towards them is examined.
To investigate the fact, I developed the classification scheme and categorized the sample set. The
classification scheme follows a mixed process: topics of sampled messages are identified in a
bottom-up manner" and also adopted categorization ideas from existing literature in a top-down
manner. Yang et al (2011), Qu et al (2009) and Vieweg et al (2010) investigate how information
regarding natural disasters flows in micro-blogging systems and online forums. In a response to
major disasters like an earthquake, because of the disaster's proximity and the 140 characters
limitation of micro-blogging, the classification of content shows the nature of homogeneity in
this circumstance. Of the majority of micro-blogging messages fall into four categories:
informational messages, action-related, opinion-related, and emotional related (Yang et al 2011).
However, since information in the online-forum discusses relatively long-term events, and since
post content has no limitation on text length, the content could be more comprehensive.
Therefore, a classification scheme is developed based on the both topic and sentiment. Following
'0 Word segmentation is the process of parsing concatenated text (i.e. text that contains no spaces or other word separators) to
infer where word breaks exist.
" The bottom-up classification means researchees define the classification scheme after skimmed through the samples massages.
47
is the summery of the category.
Table 4 Summary of categorization
Category
Reprint of news articles
supporting
criticizing
neutral
a forum message includes reprint of news and
author's/repliers' comments
support development of employment bases
criticize problems of employment bases
suggesting
criticizing
criticize problems of employment bases
OpinionNarrative of daily experience
positive attitude
negative attitude
neutral attitude
Peremeters
attitude
other comments that is neutral
a forum message that is propose some planning
action relevant to employment bases which
may ameliorate existing problems
support development of employment bases
Motions and Proposals
related
Discription
attitude
describe experience and observation relevant to
employment bases
show positive attitude towards employment
bases
show negative attitude towards employment
bases
no explicit attitude is held
Informative Messages
providing useful information relevant to
employment bases
Advertisements
ads with a address in employment bases
Informationrelated
satisfaction
frequency of
amenity's name
occurs in the
content
frequency of
amenity's name
occurs in the
content
Reprint of News and Articles
In this category, most text embodies the users' attitudes and opinions for or against the event in
an article.
For example, a post topic "Sany Headquarters Will Station in Huilongguan Area" has the
following content:
A Hundreds of billions-value Company will station, which will benefit Huilongguan's
businesses (Reprintedfrom People's Daily online).
China's largestand the world's sixth largest constructionmachinery manufacturerSany will
move its headquarterfrom Hunan to Bejing in two months. A Sany official disclosure
48
yesterday, Sany Group' administrativeheadquarterand its corefunctions of business will be
fully moved to Sany IndustrialPark in ChangpingDistrict. The official said, Sany determined
to move to Beijing, mainlyfor the needs of internationalbusiness development...1 2
This post has 12 replies and 1813 views:
o
"My first instinct, there will be a lot of outsiders migratingfrom Changsha to Bejing. (smile
face)"
o
"Sany only recruitspretty Hunan girls."
o
"Is the location near Er'bozi?"
o
"Congratulations.House value will increase. Propertyowners who have two units or more
laugh in your beard."
o
"What is it?"
o
"Sany bought a land near Yongwang ten years ago at a price of 35000 Yuan per acre.
o
"Sany hadfactory buildings there originally."
o
"It already has brand there. This time, it is the headquartersthat is moving. Furthermore,
the area is big enough to build dormitoriesfor ordinaryworkers migrantfrom Changsha."
o
"Ha what a good news. Many local workers must be reluctant to move here. Then Sany will
recruita considerableamount of workersfrom Huilongguan, which provide lots ofjob
opportunity. By the way, Sany prefers Hunanpeople."
o
"Are you sure it is not the Sany Industry Park in ChangpingLiu Village?"
o
"It is good news."
o
"Does Sany recruit?"
Three replies are positive that the new development of the Sany Industry Park will supply
considerable job opportunities to local Huilongguan residents. Three indicate that the park will
spur local economic by introducing potential customers to local business and housing markets.
Other comments are general neutral discussions about the details. Then, the supportive to
unsupportive attitude ratio is 6/0.
12
http://bbs.hlgnet.com/info/u1_24187775/
49
Totally 94 forum messages, approximately one fourth of the results fall in this category.
Narrative of Daily Experience
This category contains posts that describe different employment bases. This includes discovering
a beautiful landscape the Zhongguancun Life Science Park. Additionally, posts described the
traffic around the Er'bozi Industry Park as consistently awful. In these kinds of posts, posters,
and replies usually include subjective commentary on the existence of employment base.
Analogously, the positive/negative description ratio is counted. 56 forum messages fall into this
category. 57 forum messages fall into this category.
Motions and Proposals
The active community forum somehow facilitates public participation in the planning process
and city management. Every year, grassroots CPPCC (Chinese People's Political Consultative
Conference) members and local PCC (People's Congress Committee) members post their draft
proposals online for suggestions. Users spontaneously post their opinions and views on CPPCC/
PCC motions as well. This category of posts reveals users attitude as for or against as well as
echoes solid and detailed proposals that may ameliorate existing problems. Only ten forum
messages falls into this category, but most of them are the highest forum posts that shares most
amount of views and replies.
Informative Messages
Enthusiastic users summarize useful information, such as a shortcut to Shangdi IT Industry Base
during peak hours and a collection of all useful phone numbers in Huilongguan. In this category,
another criterion is applied to depict the impact of new development of industry parks. By
counting the frequency of keywords, more frequently used keywords imply more commonly
used one. 112 forum messages falls in this category, which reaches 28.6% of the entire results.
Advertisements
Most advertisement posts are affiliated with an address that is either the venue of an even or the
address of a company, which laterally reflect the degree of involvement of such work places.
50
Therefore, the more frequently an employment base's name appears, the higher possibility the
workplace influences people's lives.
5.2.3 Data Analysis
After organizing the results, all employment bases forum messages and their parameters are
counted respectively in five categories. The following table shows the summary of the analytic
data.
Table 5 Summary of Sentiment Data
Workplace
ID
Category
I
Supporting
Criticizing
reprint of news and articles
Message
Count
94
124
83
101
Zhongguancun Life Science Park
40
54
58
102
Shangdi IT Industry Base
11
17
11
103
Zhongguancun Changping Science Park
2
3
2
104
Beijing International Information Industry Base
4
4
5
120
Changping Industrial Park
25
40
16
0
121
Erbozi Industry Park
0
0
131
Sany Industrial Park
29
36
13
132
Hongfu Industrial Park
2
3
2
134
Beijing International Information Industry Base
I
1
0
2
Narritive of daily experience
57
48
23
101
Zhongguancun Life Science Park
37
33
18
102
Shangdi IT Industry Base
4
7
2
103
Zhongguancun Changping Science Park
2
3
0
104
Beijing International Information Industry Base
0
0
0
120
Changping Industrial Park
0
0
0
121
Erbozi Industry Park
8
6
3
131
Sany Industrial Park
9
6
2
132
Hongfu Industrial Park
0
0
0
134
Beijing International Information Industry Base
1
1
0
3
Motion and proposals
Message
Count
10
Positive
Attitude
27
Negative
Attitude
3
101
Zhongguancun Life Science Park
4
9
0
102
Shangdi IT Industry Base
2
5
0
103
Zhongguancun Changping Science Park
0
0
0
104
Beijing International Information Industry Base
1
2
0
120
Changping Industrial Park
2
13
2
121
Erbozi Industry Park
4
7
1
51
131
Sany Industrial Park
2
4
0
132
Hongfu Industrial Park
0
0
0
134
Beijing International Information Industry Base
2
12
2
Frequency
4
Informative messages
Message
Count
112
101
Zhongguancun Life Science Park
36
39
102
Shangdi IT Industry Base
11
13
103
Zhongguancun Changping Science Park
12
14
104
Beijing International Information Industry Base
8
8
120
Changping Industrial Park
6
8
121
Erbozi Industry Park
30
35
131
Sany Industrial Park
14
16
132
Hongfu Industrial Park
1
1
125
134
Beijing International Information Industry Base
13
15
5
advertisements
42
42
101
Zhongguancun Life Science Park
15
15
102
Shangdi IT Industry Base
10
9
103
Zhongguancun Changping Science Park
11
11
104
Beijing International Information Industry Base
0
0
120
Changping Industrial Park
2
2
121
Erbozi Industry Park
5
5
131
Sany Industrial Park
4
4
132
Hongfu Industrial Park
0
0
134
Beijing International Information Industry Base
8
8
Daily influence:
The following chart and table demonstrates the overall distribution of forum message topics
across five categories. As mentioned before, this count reflects employment bases influence on
netizens daily life.
52
40
35
30
25
20
Is
10
i~.w
0 k4*
MW
I~a.~ Iw~wue~m Indwnal ia
17ig
Fig6re
F
10
t*uv% 14i) 0j".M it4
0VA
4
0
t7~iH4W
4o
~ %amu klai n~
mesA
I
0
0
4t*
II
q
Figure 17 Forum message distribution
First of all, netizens attention and concern for different employment bases vary. The minimum
amount of messages about one particular employment base is 3 while the maximum is 132.
While, in each forum message, the amount mean of views is 854.2, and amount mean of replies
is 3.47. This means each topic regarding employment bases draws attention from 854 users on
average, in which an average nearly 3.5 netizens are involved in the discussion of this topic. The
median view is 382 and median reply is 1, which means that the distribution of attention is
positively skewed. In addition, several topics are highly popular with thousands of views and
dozens of replies.
Second, based solely on the above chart, the message topics are markedly concentrated in a
couple of employment bases. Zhongguancun Life Science Park ranks first in both total amount of
forum messages and in each individual category. Sany Industrial Park, Erbozi Industry Park, and
Changping Industrial Park respectively rank in second, third, and fifth with a peak in specific
categories: reprint of news and informative one. Shangdi IT Industry Base is ranked fourth,
however, distributed more evenly in all five categories. Other employments have less influence
on netizens' daily life.
-
- - - -MM
-
53
Table 6 Relation among industry parks' area, distance and their daily influence indicator
Zhongguancun Life Science Park
Shangdi IT Industry Base
Zhongguancun Changping Science
Beijing International Information
Industry Base
Changping Industrial Park
Erbozi Industry Park
Sany Industrial Park
Hongfu Industrial Park
Beijing II Industry Base
Area/
hector
252
232
65
155
Distance/
mile
4
3.9
7.5
3.6
Opinionoriented
81
17
4
5
51
21
23
8
120
20
34
55
5
7.9
2.75
2.66
2.2
0.3
27
12
40
2
4
8
35
18
1
21
Frequency
Third, a positive correlation seems to appear among post amount and industry parks' scale
and proximity. Industry parks with larger area and shorter distance tend to be more influential.
However, since the sample size is too small (10), regression or other statistic tools cannot be
applied to give a quantitative model. Also, longer history of development seems to increase the
amount of posts.
Last, specific characters influence the distribution. Location of public transit station,
breaking events, and hlgnet location, etc. could contribute to peaks in the above diagram as well.
For instance, the Zhongguancun Life Science Park is the most popular employment base in
category one. This can be explained by its large scale and long history. Nevertheless, the fact that
one subway station on the Changping Line is named Zhongguancun Life Science Park also
contributes to the daily experience category for many users to discuss about their commuter
condition. Incidents like a traffic accident near Erbozi Industry Park may contribute to the small
peak in frequency (35). And because the Huilongguan Community Forum's office locates in
Beijing II Industry Park, many ads contain this location, which explains its relatively high
frequency (21) with such a small area.
In the last two categories, the Shangdi IT Industry Base overwhelmingly exceeds others. Though
the Shangdi IT Industry Base locates out of Huilongguan Neighbourhood, its high frequency
parallel with the fact that majority of Huilongguan residents have a job relevant to information
technology industry and most of such residents work in Shangdi.
54
Residents' attitude towards the development of employment bases
The following diagram shows the attitude to each industry parks.
120
Positiveattitude in Motion and proposals
" Supporting narmtive of daily experience
" Supporting reprint of news and articles
Negative attitude in motion and proposals
" Criticizing namtive of daily experience
80
* Criticizing reprint of news and articles
Frequency in informative messages
Frequency in advertisements
40
Industry Base
fndisiry Base
-20
-40
-60
-80
Figure 18 Residents' attitude towards the development o employment bases
All first three categories have a positive to negative ratio that is larger than 1, which indicate that
in general, netizens positive and supportive attitude exceeds the negative attitude.
When taking a close look at the negative posts and replies, complains mainly concentrate in
topics of commuting. For example, Subway Changping Line formulate the station called Life
Science Park, which links the main body of Changping New Town to the north, and connect the
west part of Huilongguan to Subway Line 13 to the south. However, the location of Life Science
Park Station isn't adjacent to the Zhongguancun Life Science Park. A 1.2 kilometres walk is
needed from the station to the science park. This plan bothers many netizens both in daily
commute and occasional use of subway line to the central city. Complains of bad experience in
55
daily commute like this reveal the fact that even these employment bases are developed, the
inadequacy of coordinating and cooperating amenities could still leave problems.
In the discussion of whether an industry park has benefited residents in Huilongguan, 65% of
people support the development because of the following reasons:
o
The development of such industry parks boost local economy and contribute to local fiscal
revenue. This increment may help to facilitate urbanization process near Huilongguan and
elevate local governments' administrative quality and reduce corruption.
o
The developments attract new population, which increase the demand of service industry.
This will both benefit the existing commercial amenities, and will require amenity
development which can also serve the current residents.
o
Good landscapes in industry parks like Zhongguancun Life Science Park become attraction
for residents' daily exercise.
5.3 Top Discussions in the Online Forum
The top fifteen most popular discussions in opinion-oriented categories are summarized in the
following table. Some topics directly discuss plans and developments of addition of employment
bases; others don't produce arguments that are directly related to work zones, but produce
relevant comment or express relevant opinions to these employment bases.
Table 7 Most popular topics regarding to employment bases
56
Topic
Ultimate resolution of Subway Line 13, 8, Changping and 16
Replies
67
Views
2915
Category
Motions and Proposals
Call for comments: proposal for 2013 Political Consultative council
60
8602
Motions and Proposals
The "Great Zhongguan" Plan: great possibility of the merging of Haidian and Changping
Why not build more industry campus in Huilingguan?
36
12319
Reprint of news articles
34
2639
Motions and Proposals
South area of Changping District will be included in "Great Zhongguan" Plan
15
818
Reprint of news articles
Iluilongguan will absorb relocated population from central city's redevelopment
15
1699
Reprint of news articles
TBD Plan will raise housing price in Huilongguan
13
5271
Reprint of news articles
Ilaidian district control its permanent resident population within one million
13
5438
Reprint of news articles
Exposure of negative behavior: someone jumping a queue on Line 8 this morning
12
3725
Narrative of daily experience
Sany Industry move its headquarter to Huilongguan
Build lluilongguan-Tiantongyuan national community integrated demonstrate zone
I1
10
562
Reprint of news articles
1443
Motions and Proposals
A proposal to optimize bus routes in Huilongguan
9
1133
Reprint of news articles
9
2061
Reprint of news articles
797
Reprint of news articles
2311
Reprint of news articles
Sany Industry's headquarter will locate in
Huilongguan
The Shangcheng community is determined as illegal project
9
Shangcheng project is one of them! Nine plots that use R&D landuse to build apartments 8
are investigated and punished
The popular topics focus on the following aspects:
o
"Great Zhongguan" Plan: is an integration of administrative resources and industry park
resources, to build a bigger platform for world-class high-tech industrial bases.
The ratio
of supportive opinions to oppositions about planning employment bases is 26/17.
o
Discussion of developing more industry campuses in Huilongguan. The ratio of supportive
opinions to oppositions about planning employment bases is 16/4.
o
Proposals of optimizing traffic routes.
Counterviews on the work zone planning concentrate on questioning the plan's implementation,
and potential burden the employment bases will spike on both environment and on public facility
such as elementary school and hospital capacity.
The supporting netizens argue that their positive impact on local economy and their role in
meeting demand of local job opportunity can beat the disadvantages.
5.4 Findings
General speaking, the development of employment bases in and near Huilongguan neighborhood
relieve the demanding pressure of nearby work place in Huilongguan.
57
First, as time goes on, more and more scaled entrepreneurs choose to locate their headquarters
and brands in the employment bases. Most of them are attracted by the government's favorable
policies like tax abatement, and by the location advantage of high-tech agglomeration.
Second, these employment bases do absorb local workforce as well as introduce new employers
into the neighborhood. Large amount of IT engineers choose to buy house units in Huilongguan
for its convenient location and relatively low price. ((R23) I chose to leave here because the
distancefrom here to my husband'workplace is really small.)((R]3) . . definitely most people live
here because of the low housingprice.) At the same time, many young residents whose reason to
live in Huilongguan is relocation or marriage find new skilled jobs in surrounded industrial parks.
((R15) after graduation, I triedto find ajob in ShangdiIndustry park. It is convenient to live
here and work in Shangdi). The employment bases' demands of workforce facilitate the
demographic dynamic of Huilongguan in which the community gets fresh blood ((R26) I moved
here to help my relative. Now I am responsiblefor the daily operation of his small
grocery)((netizen) Sany attractnuminous young pretty girls in the neighborhood). Meanwhile,
the vigor of workforce also support more third industry such retail, dining service, recreational
service, requirement of children' education and etc.
Third, the employment bases' influence vary base on preliminary planning decisions. Proximity
and accessibility play an important role in it. Other elements such as built quality of environment,
openness and publicity also influence the effect.
Fourth, the development of employment bases has improves the live work balance, yet not
enough. Still, 65% of residents' work locates outside Huilongguan or above employment bases.
Furthermore, the preliminary plan of Huilongguan left little space for work zone development,
which badly restricts the increment ofjob opportunity within the neighborhood. Last, addition of
employment bases needs parallel development of other amenities and facilities.
58
6
Commercial Amenities and Services
China, as a large economy, has been progressing rapidly in its urbanization. Among the hundreds
of cities that have been growing rapidly, first tier cities like, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou
have especially significant acceleration on their development speed. This occurs by taking
advantage of their regional centre positions that allocate them with the largest amount of
resources, including capital and manpower. The average income in these cities has been growing
fast, therefore, people started to increase their expenditure in order to increase the quality of life.
When making decisions about where to live in Beijing, the only concern is not accessibility to
employment. The amenity and infrastructure services became increasingly important criteria for
the competitiveness of different residential community in Beijing. On the one hand, people want
a better quality life, so they will look for a place that could provide them with enough amenities
including food and beverage in addition to sport and leisure services. On the other hand, they are
responsible for taking care of their families, which includes seniors and children, whether this
area could have access to good hospitals or schools; these decisions weigh very much on the
person's choice of home location.
Taking Huilongguan as a case study, to analyze and evaluate their amenity and infrastructure
service is a very important step.
6.1 The Amenity Index
Thanks to information technology, open platforms currently allow us to able to access data. In
this analysis we developed a method to evaluate Huilongguan's amenity and infrastructure
service by measuring the index of different amenity or infrastructure component.
Data Platform.
The major data source used is the website called, Dazhongdianping (public review). It is an
information platform for urban leisure services based on mass commentary. By the end of 2014,
it already covered 300 cities in China, with service providers registered for over 4 million. This
website has very convincing coverage in first tier cities,.
59
As mentioned in Chapter four, the Dazhongdianping search engine allows users to search by
service type and area. The website returns a number of accessible services in different category
for every query. For example, searching "Entertainment" in it, the website directs the user to a
webpage showing the number of each "Entertianment" genre such as theaters, karaoke studios
and board game bars that is accessible in Huilongguan.
Categories
Since Huilongguan is mostly functional as a residential area, the analysis will therefore be
concentrated on four categories that are most closely related to residential amenity and
infrastructure. The four categories are: food and beverage, leisure and entertainment, sports and
health, education and hospital. Among them, the first three are categorized as amenity services,
while the last is categorized as a public facility service.
The index
In order to understand how well Huilongguan is doing in providing sufficient amenity and
infrastructural services, the entire city of Beijing, as a whole, is examined. Given a specific
service type, taking food as an example, by dividing the overall number of food services
(N=90103) by the total population (P=2 1,000,000) in Beijing, the average number of accessible
food services per person in Beijing (n=4.29/1 000ppl) is calculated.
Nfood-Beijing/PBeijing=
nfood-Beijing
=
4.29/1000 pp1
This number reflects the average condition in Beijing. Following that, by doing the same
calculation, the same number for the Huilongguan area is calculated:
Nfood-HLG/PHLG
=nfood-HLG
=
3.55/1000 pp1
By dividing Huilongguan's number by Beijing's number, the Huilongguan Food service index I
is calculated:
Ifood-HLG = nfood-HLG/nfood-Beijing =
0.83
60
In summary:
Table 8 Formula of the amenity index
Areal Accessible Amenities Per Person
Beijing Accessible Amenities Per Person
Amenity Index
B
A
Sejing
Restaurant
Restaurant Index
Uon
I 10000 pp
eawft
population
90103
21000000
4.29
B/A
Wanglng
/1000 ppI
1631
3.55
Restaurant' Index
1000 ppI
083
162
4.66
109
46600-6300
This number provides a sense of Huilongguan's progress in comparison to the city of Beijing.
Regarding a specific type of service, if I >1, people living in Huilongguan have relatively higher
accessibility towards this service, which tends to positively influence the overall performance of
this area. If I < 1, Huilongguan have less accessibility to this service. In terms of food, it's
obvious that people living here have less access to food services (restaurant, caf6, bakery etc.)
In the following analysis, this method will be applied to each of the four categories and their
sub-categories to give the Huilongguan area a well-rounded evaluation and reading.
6.2 Comparative Evaluation - Wang Jing Area
In this analysis, given the fact that Huilongguan is a residentially oriented area, instead of only
referencing it in comparison to the whole city of Beijing, it will be of more help to discover a
comparative case.
Located in the Northeast part of Beijing, seated in between the 4 11 and the 5h Ring Roads, Wang
Jing is one of the most well developed residential areas in Beijing, with a population around
350,000 people, including professions from all over the world, especially Korea.
In 2014, unit prices in the Wang Jing area reached 44,000 RMB/m2, which is significantly
higher than Huilongguan's which reached 31,000 RMB/m2. Price differences were attributed by
their locations. However, by comparing housing prices between Wang Jing and other residential
areas that are at similar locations, it's obvious Wang Jing's housing price is still higher, which
61
-- ANN-
means people would like to pay a premium to stay in Wang Jing only to enjoy its amenity and
facility services.
By putting together the amenity and facility indexes of Huilongguan and Wang Jing and
observing their differences, some conclusions can be drawn regarding the developments of
Huilongguan, in terms of what has been achieved and what is lacking.
WWV J Ing
OOR
40000 RMB
Figure 19 Three residential neighborhoods and their housing prices
6.3 Food and Beverage
Chinese people have developed a long history of food culture. By analysing the food service
index as well as other data, a lot of information can be read:
Table 9 Index of different style of food
62
e -,g oo0
S-an F
Sv, F ooe
No0,T E.a~.
C.&-tone Food
60 -,q
'56'
121 026 W
6o
189' 029
2055
0 10
009
'846
'553
00?
004
6ve."n
55?
530
F 00
oo
Fa"
1'S11e
Food
X
sna-30og Fcod
436
ti~wFood
209
'29
'32?
006
-vwFow
Korer
008
0 13
5
QW
003
12
24
0,03
003
0 02
002
001
00'
37
39
00
5
om
00'
002
00 1
000
a
$
2
5
5
Toa
0ODpA*s0I
<0.5
0171
62
34
23
34
i6
12
1
023
010
007
010
005
0031
000
001
02
00
001
4
3
1,06
3
4
001
001
217
54
7
062
139
004
0 04
l
06
95
1V
U
0?'
'00622
46
030
029
00
125
006
32
007
1 16
16
003
000
101
l ie
003
001
488
141
93
12
23
16
794
0 5
309
06
1s9
279
00
1632
466
3.54
6266
6048
725
60*0
429
'000000
0.5-1
142
031
007
34
355
1631
107
0.0
(M
1.2-2 0
Regional
Foreign
0151
0 02
040
Other
Types
027
0031
007
0 05
1M
350000
460000
1-1.2
Regional
Chinese
0011
19
1
,234 001 0 000,
sow!E
S. Foo
SO9F
568
05
"4
Pas, F nod
Sa1e1V
"0 Px
Resaurant9
Waging
9estUwant/10000 p0 Hudowv"eR**tWvsenL wndas
0 19 0
OA
361
>2
The Table above shows the number of all food categories in Beijing, Huilongguan, and
Wangjing areas. The coloured columns represent the food index in Huilongguan and Wang Jing,
where different levels of colour suggest the value of each index number.
Overall, the table tells that Huilongguan has a relatively low food index (0.83), and it's lower
than Beijing average, whereas Wang Jing's index (1.09) is slightly higher than 1. The result
suggests that Wang Jiang beat Huilongguan by over 30% for food service per person.
Looking more into the details in the indexes of subcategories, the categorization was interesting
since it actually allowed for reading demographics of two places.
First of all, both of these two areas have very little Beijing cuisine (0.05), which highlights that
both areas are composed mostly of immigrants. As for regional cuisine, Huilongguan is doing
very well in the areas of North-eastern and North-western food. Wangjing has relatively more
Cantonese food and Jiangzhe Food; Guizhou food doesn't count because the sample is too small.
It has a significantly high index number in foreign cuisine, especially Korean food. As a matter
of fact, foreign cuisine and Cantonese as well as Jiangzhe food are considered expensive and
high end compared with other kinds of food.
63
More interesting data includes the bakery index in Huilongguan, which is extremely behind
(0.69). It is beaten by Wang Jing (1.35) for almost 100 percent.
100%
Buffet
Sea Food
90%
80%
Other
Hot Pot
Types
Bakery
Fast Food
South Eastern
70%
Japanese
eKorean
60%
Western
Guizhou Food
IO
50%
Hubei Food
Shandong Food
40%
*Xinjiang Food
Yunan Food
FoJiangzhe
30%
Food
a North
20%
Western
Cantonese Food
North Eastern
Hunan Food
10%
Sichuan Food
0%
Beijing Food
Beijing - HiLopggyanW-
fgIng
Figure 20 Distribution of food in two neighborhoods
After examining the index of food services, it is also worth for us to look at price distribution of
each give area:
Table 10 Price distribution in the two areas
Price
0-20
20-50
50-80
80-120
120-200
>200
Total
Average Price
Beijing
4984
10025
5597
1930
1035
680
24251
57.5
21%
41%
23%
8%
4%
3%
Huilongguan
92
184
77
11
7
0
371
39.3
64
25%
50%
21%
3%
2%
0%
Wangling
68
261
203
77
31
10
650
61.0
10%
40%
31%
12%
5%
2%
60%
50%
40%
-Beijing
30%
Huilongguan
--
20%
Wangjing
10%
0%
0-20
20-50
50-80 80-120 120-200 >200
This set of data represents the percentage of food services in each price range (RMB). In terms of
overall distribution, the majority of food services are allocated in the 20-50 RMB price range
Compared with the overall price distribution in Beijing, Huilongguan has a relatively larger
percentage of mid and low cost restaurants (75% against 62%), while Wang Jing has more
mid-high end restaurants. From the data, it shows that the curve doesn't really drop from the
20-50 to the 50-80 range. In terms of average price per restaurant, Huilongguan is significantly
lower than the Wang Jing, which is about the same but slightly higher than the Beijing average.
Several conclusions could be drawn regarding Huilongguan from the food and beverage analysis:
1)
As a residential area generally for immigrants, immigrants in Huilongguan are mostly
from inland China, and possibly more from the northern part of China.
2)The current food and beverage market in this area is aimed at mid and low income
persons, which could be detected from the price distribution.
3)Compared with more developed and high-end residential communities, Huilongguan
needs more mid-to-high end restaurants, including foreign restaurants and bakeries.
Although this is a quantitative analysis, these conclusions are still slightly suggestive. Since food
and beverage markets, in a specific area, are generated by the population and their income, in
terms of development suggestion. Rather than investing to attract more mid-to-high end F&B
service, it is more about attracting more high income population.
65
6.4 Leisure and Entertainment
Table 11 Leisure and entertainment index
Beijing
Cafe
Tea House
massage
bath
KTV
Art&culture
Cinema
Pool Game
Table Game
Entertaining
Internet Bar
2691
1853
4505
3190
1588
Park
3946
315
1497
235
817
1255
856
Total
31834
Population
21000000
Average/10000ppl
1.28
0.88
2.15
1.52
0.76
1.88
0.15
0.71
0.11
0.39
0.60
0.41
15.16
Huilongguan Average/i
index
0.63 ji WM
29
27
0.59
0.67
119
2.59
1.21
121
2.63
14
0.30
0.52
24
0.72
0.11
5
51
1.11
7
1.36
14
17
6
0.15
0.30
0.37
0.13
500
10.87
0.77
0.78
0.62
Average/10Index
Wangjling
128
3.66,.
1.17
41
4.06
142
M,86
30
27
0.77
141
4.03
1.33
05
L2
a
0.23
33
4
22
19
20
0.94
0.11
0.54
0.91
0.57
1.40
710
20.29
134
1.32
1.0
0.63
350000
460OW0
In leisure and entertainment indexes, it can be easily observed that the gap between Huilongguan
and Wangjing increased even more. Wang Jing's index is higher than Beijing in almost every
aspect. The only two categories that Wang Jing is lower (bath and internet bar) actually reflect
the fact that Wang Jing has more developed infrastructure, so that bath and internet services
become privatized in comparison with Beijing.
Most of Huilongguan's indexes are lower than Beijing's average, which reflects the lag of leisure
and entertainment development in this area. The higher index of the bath category proves that
that the infrastructure in Huilongguan has yet to improve. The higher index of pool games and
table games means that there are relatively more young people with middle or low income
because these two consumption types are generally considered low cost.
66
8(V%
60%,
Puo" Gajme
-Beijing
-Wangjlng
-Huilonggun
Figure 21 Leisure genre and distribution
One crucial thing that needs to be pointed out is the art & culture service index. Huilongguan,
though labelled as a cultural residential area by the government, is actually an area that is
seriously lacking art and cultural activities. Huilonguan's index in art and culture is significantly
low (0.28), while at the same time Wang Jing's reaches an impressive 2.34, there is almost 10
times difference.
As a matter of fact, in order to develop into a better residential town for Beijing, the art and
culture sectors are definitely worth investing in to cater to future development. Here, unlike food
and beverage, which is more driven by existing populations, the art and culture market could
actually attracting people to come and settle. Therefore, in terms of developmental strategy, it's
strongly suggested that Huilongguan invest to attract more art and culture services, and
implement them into the community.
6.5 Sports & Health
Unlike the previous two indexes, the overall amenity index of sports and health in Huilongguan
(1.15) is slightly higher than the average of the entire Beijing area. However, when comparing
the indexes between Huilongguan and Wangjing, the dramatic difference indicates that further
development is supposed to be implemented in terms of sports and health.
67
Table 12 Sports index comparison
wanftg
population per 10000
Hulene
per 10000
Bedminton
Dance
martial arts
Tennis
Swimming
Baskeba
Footbal
Total
population per 10000
21000000
3000D0
460000
SPORS &HATH
Snooker & Pool
Gym
keng
33
48
44
15
1.04
0.96
0.33
12
026
12
9
0.265
0,20
8
0.17
7
7
5
0.153
015
3.630435
0.33M
1.27
0,20
6
6
S
0.20
0.73
0.33
0.17
202
6.733333
22
10
0.M1
167
1.63
0.77
38
Lit
S
1497
1937
641
291
1.10
49
23
10
691
360
315
535
213
132
1
.
population
0.71
0.92
0.31
0.14
0.33
017
0.15
0.25
0.10
0.06
6612 3.148571
By examining more details at the index of subcategories, it's clear that badminton and football
are the only two index values higher than 1.50. Obviously, the Huilongguan community has a
tradition of annual inter-league matches of these two sports. Thus, these two sports are relatively
more popular among Huilongguan residents. It can be concluded that the internal demand does
play a crucial role in the development of sports and health amenities.
R~1
"'V
nlol
wts'
4~I
4Th~
MDv
01,
A~
a(
6P'o
*S
Beijing
Hudongguan
tAe & i'ovt
Wanglpig
Figure 22 Sports genre and distribution
The proportion graph shows that the amenity distribution of the Huilongguan area shares
similarities with the entire Beijing area. Compared with Wang Jing, the amenity distribution in
Huilongguan is more generic without any specific preference. Therefore, in order to enhance the
diversity and the density of sports and health amenities, Huilongguan is encouraged to organize
more, various public events and advocate residents to participate in different types of sports.
68
6.6 Public Services
China's one child policy causes all parents to care and to be concerned very deeply about their
child's development. Therefore, the quality of schools has significant impact on parents' choice
of community. In some extreme cases, parents are even willing to sacrifice the convenience of
working from home in order to live closer to a good school.
Table 13 Infrastructure and public service index
EDUCATION
kindergarten
primary school
middle school & high school
PUBUC SERVICE
Hospital
Bank
101
15
4
2.20
0.33
0.09
99
81
2.15
1.76
Beijing
Wanjing
population per 10000
300000
Huilongguan
population per 10000
460000
0.3
58
18
9
1.93
0.60
0.30
75
229
2.50
7.63
population per 10000
21000000
0.93
0.84
Mas
3924
1523
753
1.87
0.73
0.36
6203
11954
2.95
5.69
Huilongguan's infrastructure can be defined as the most underdeveloped amenity sector out
of the entire family. In terms of education, there is a dramatic gap between preschool education
(1.14) and primary-school education (0.45). The graph shows that the kindergarten index in
Huilongguan appears to be in a good condition, while the school index is surprisingly low
compared with Wang Jing or the Beijing area. The situation becomes increasingly worse when
the education level gets increases. The Huilongguan neighbourhood is not able to provide
sufficient educational resources. In this case, many families start to migrate to other places when
the existing education environment cannot fulfil their basic requirement.
To transform the Huilongguan area into a sustainably living neighbourhood, the government
should take more actions to increase supply and improve quality of the nine-year compulsory
education.
6.7 Findings
Ten years ago, while Huilongguan's amenity plan hadn't been fully implemented, the then
existing amenity space only had a occupancy rate of 50% (Chenglei Li, 2006). News articles
reported that the early inhabitants suffered from scarcity of all kinds of amenities. "This kind of
plan has only residential buildings with no industry and no infrastructure. Certainly a lot of
69
problems came up. The ideal new town has facility developed with housing. However, facilities
formation and accumulation requires patience, time and cost. (Tang, 2007)"
Figure 23 photos of amenities in Huilongguan, in 2009
Comparing to the current condition of amenities in Huilongguan, improvements have emerged.
The neighborhood has a more mature system of commercial amenity. Gaps between
Huilongguan's amenity level and Beijing's decrease or even are overtaken. Interviews echo this
finding:
"(R5) the commerce is complete and convenient, and all commercial amenities distributed
adjacent to home. We usually went to the Hualianmall. It is really convenient, with a cinema
and lots of restaurants....speak of other recreationalamenity, eh; you must go to the city
center."
"(R25) yes, the commerce is adequatefor daily life. And there are many outdoor athletic
facilities in housing clusters. We also take walks to HuilongguanSports Parkfor exercise."
"(R14) restaurantsand recreationalamenities are adequate. They are much improved then
before. However, it is so inconvenient that there are no banks nearby. And if have serious
illness, I will choose hospitals in town, because I don't quite trust the medical skill of hospitals
in Huilongguan."
The research indicate that service level of commercial amenity and facility has been improved to
satisfy residents' basic requirement of daily life. Among all categories, however, the most
important two elements are cultural amenity and educational facility. The former will
significantly increase the quality of life in this area and the latter can convince more families to
stay in this are in the long run. Despite the lower housing price, Huilongguan's core
70
competitiveness comparing with other residential neighbourhoods like Wang Jing weakens
because of the scarcity of high-end commercial amenities like cultural venues and advanced
public facilities like secondary schools and comprehensive hospitals.
71
7 Conclusion
7.1 Research Results
Let us re-examine the original research question. Can crowd sourced data be used to
evaluate planning strategy and facility quality? After analyzing this method, this thesis
provides a positive answer to this question. By collecting data from a wide range of
online community forums and social media websites, as well as analyzing keywords of
distribution and sentiment, the planning of public facilities and amenities in Huilongguan
has been investigated and evaluated. This can be one of many tools to evaluate the
planning of amenities.
In order to sharpen the analysis process into an operational tool, the research steps of
previous chapters are summarized below.
1.
Data Resources
a)
Choosing resources - in an era that features the rapid development of Internet
technology and social media, as well as the popularization of mobile terminals,
online communication has become cheap and widely accessible. Furthermore,
online community forums have sprung up in different regions like mushrooms.
In China, many of them, such as the Huilongguan Community Forum, have even
developed into first-class online forums. Because they are regional (or
subdivided geographically like Dazhongdianping) and feature widespread
participation by local residents, social data extracted from these online platforms
is a major resource.
b) Grabbing data - technology such as web crawlers (also called web spiders or
automatic indexers; scripts that systematically browse the Internet and grab data
for later processing) area used in the collection of data. Queries are made in the
search interface using the names of research objects or keywords.
c)
Structure of results - information such as discussion topics, time, popularity
72
(amount of views) and replies can be collected for later analysis.
2.
Data Processing
Data is processed to merge repeat records and remove irrelevant ones.
3.
Content Analysis
a)
Classification of data - this step helps to explain which topics related to
amenities have drawn attention. In Chapter 5, a number of articles about new
plans or proposals, as well as suggestions, are discussed. Narratives about daily
experiences are recorded to reveal the level of satisfaction and ads are posted to
show the influences of amenities on daily life. Similar to Chapter 5, data is
categorized into three parts in Chapter 6. These categories are discussions related
to plans, built facilities (subway system hardware) and daily operations and
services (software).
b)
Distribution of topics - this step reflects the daily influence of amenities on the
lives of residents.
c)
Attitude and satisfaction - this step indicates whether the general attitude
towards an amenity is positive or negative. Major concerns and the reasons that
have led to discontent are analyzed in detail.
d) Case study of the top debates on online forums - the in-depth study in this part
analyzes the topics with the most participants and reveals embedded facts.
4.
General Evaluation and Conclusion
A general evaluation of amenities is conducted by synthesizing the above steps.
In summary, a duplicable method is proposed for planners and decision makers to gain a
practical understand of the planning process for amenities.
7.2 Major findings
73
How can this tool be used? What are the findings from using this method? Echoes the
second research question, findings can be extracted from the above-mentioned process of
analysis and additional amenities can be evaluated. This evaluation reflects the partial
improvement, as well as reveals the problems, of amenities.
a)
In general, local residents hold a positive attitude towards the improvement of
employment bases, transportation and commercial amenities.
b)
All three types of amenities were improved, but these improvements were
insufficient. They satisfied the basic requirements of residents. However, the
developments of advanced facility and amenity such as high quality secondary schools
and comprehensive hospitals are inadequate.
c)
Although the overall plan benefited the neighborhood, the lack of detailed design
caused major dissatisfaction. For example, the lack of noise-reducing walls for the
subway Line 13 annoyed residents who live along this subway line. Additionally, the lack
of screen doors in subway station platforms was a safety hazard, and even resulted in
accidents involving passengers falling on to the subway tracks.
d)
Furthermore, after the plans for amenities were implemented, daily operations and
maintenance became big issues that were subject to complaints and criticism.
e)
The construction of one type of amenity required parallel and matching construction
of others. For example, a new industry park required a corresponding transportation route
and the new subway station required small amenities such as deli vendors to
accommodate passengers.
Employment bases
To some extent, the construction of employment amenities provided new employment
opportunities and new locations for residents of neighborhoods in Huilongguan. However,
the preliminary plan did not leave sufficient land for the development of commercial or
office amenities, which restricted the development of a multi-functional district.
74
Mass Transit
Over the past decade, a large amount of new transportation infrastructure was built.
Problems with traffic congestion were solved and commute times were reduced. However,
improved traffic only cured the symptoms, not the disease. The key was planning a
multi-functional neighborhood during preliminary stages, or at least leaving sufficient
land for further commercial and industrial development.
Commercial Amenity and other facility
Despite the fact that current commercial amenities meet the daily requirements of dining,
shopping and recreation, the scarcity of scaled and quality amenities weakened the core
competitiveness of the neighborhood. It caused residents to leave the city center for better
education opportunities for their children.
The existence of Huilongguan, as a suburban mega community in Beijing, came from
necessity. Over the past 15 years, Huilongguan contributed heavily to absorbing Beijing's
urbanization, as well as providing a strong base for the city to develop its IT industry.
With Beijing's expansion towards the northwest, Huilongguan is a welcoming
gentrification opportunity to be upgraded to a more attractive neighbourhood. However,
in order to seize this opportunity, the government must provide more high-income jobs
that are accessible to this area as well as invest in the amenity and facility development.
7.3 Limitation and Future Research
First, the social data extracted from online forum are biased. In crowdsourcing, a generic
element is who constitute the active crowd. This question isn't discussed in the thesis.
Though data are completely analyzed (e.g. employment bases and commercial amenities)
or randomly sampled (mass transit), the residents who participate in online forum may
not represent the whole group of people in the neighborhood. If an analogy is drawn
between the abovementioned data collecting process and the sampling process in
statistics, there may be biases. Main body of active netizens in hlgnet is comprised of
early inhabiting, high-income, and well-educated people. On the contrary, opinions from
75
renters (mainly low-income labors in service industry) are barely expressed from the
online forums and public review networks. A seventh of the interviewees use the
Huilongguan Community Forum, while the ratio reaches 6/14.
Second, the research collects prolonged data from the very beginning of the online
platforms. This research builds its comparison between social data and historical reality
extracted from literature. Neither scopes of time are specified, nor are before-and-after
situations compared from same data source. Despite cost, longitudinal studies such as
penal study can be conducted in the future tract the dynamic of Huilongguan's amenity.
Third, this method is only used in Huilongguan's case to conduct planning evaluation.
However, plan concept and social context may distinguish, and the applicability of this
method need to be testified in future research.
7.4 Implications
Social data from community forum and public reviews is one tool among numerous
others to evaluate planning intervention. Moreover, this tool provides a more transparent
and less time-consuming way to analyze first-hand data in order to assess the outcome of
planning. New communities such as Huilongguan are prevailing in not only mega cities
but also in many second-tier cities in China. Moreover, many of these new communities
face similar problems as Huilongguan, including insufficient local amenities and facilities,
excessive commute times, traffic congestion, etc. By evaluating the development of
amenity in Huilongguan, effective methods can be discovered for decision makers and
planners to alleviate such problems.
76
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Appendix I
The most popular posts regarding to employment bases
1.
There is a great opportunity that Haidian and Changping will be integrated into
one district, 'Zhongguan District'
a)
Summary of News 2009/12/29
Soon after, the Zhongguancun National Innovation Demonstration Zone will appear as a
special "company" integrated industry parks and employment bases across administrative
region 'Haidian' and 'Changping' . Next year, the Beijing City will focus on the pooling
of resources of Haidian and Changping Districts, integrating regional resources such as
the core area of Zhongguancun and the Changping Industry Town, and the develop will
focus on the construction of the northern part of the high-tech industrial belt which
comprise the future increase of low-carbon, biological medicine, new energy, new
materials, electronic information and other high-tech strategic industries.
b) Replies Summary: Views: 12330; Replies: 51;
-/+: 20/12
Most popular opinion and amount:
o
Negative: Questioning on authenticity of the news and questioning on
implementation. 13; Positive: it is a process/ good beginning. 6.
o
Negative: Spiking Burden of children's education (elementary school). 5; Positive:
potential opportunity for introducing new quality schools and reduce commuter
distance to elementary schools. 3.
o
Negative: Stimulating housing price in Huilongguan. 2. Positive: 0.
o
Burden existing traffic: 2. Positive: 0.
o
Negative: 0; Positive: facilitating urbanization and governments' administration
quality/ reduce corruption. 3.
2.
'Great Zhongguan' Plan will raise the housing price in Huilongguan
85
a)
Summary of News 2011/11/18
As the first year , twelve five, , in 2011, new policies, new directions, all will be
gradually clear with the successful open of the National People's Congress, among which
is the "Great zhongguan" plan that has draw various attention for a long time.
According to the municipal plan, in the next five years, Changping District will construct
the core area of Zhongguancun National Innovation Demonstration Zone, Zhongguancun
Life Science Institute, Zhongguancun National Engineering and Technology Innovation
Base, as well as coordinate with Haidian District to promote the building of Technology
Business District (TBD), the Future Science and Technology Town, Shahe University
City and other significant industrial function area. Finally in Beijing, the plan aims to
create a world-class high-tech industrial base in north Beijing. The plan expects to fully
realize the great idea of "the Great Zhongguan" which build on the platform of two
districts, three towns and houndreds of schools.
This vision not only will integrate traffic, amenity and industry resource from Haidian
and Changping and make them mutually reinforcing, but also will produce a broad and
profound impact on whole city's economy, culture, and the development of high-tech
industry.
b)
Replies Summary: Views: 8306; Replies: 14;
/-: 6/5
Most popular opinion and amount:
Positive: facilitating the economic development of Huilongguan/ increasing housing price
in Huilongguan. 5; Negative: it is propaganda./ housing price only relate to
demand-supply equilibrium./ The trend of industry is saturated. 6.
3.
Why not build more industry campus in Huilongguan?
a)
Summary of post 2010/07/27
What if Huilongguan develop some office buildings and technology campus? They
86
people can choose their job location close to their home, which will ease the traffic
pressure. And everyone will be happy with the convenient employment location.
With the special loacation and human resources, Changping District Government should
consider develop new science and technology parks, instead of building such parks in
remote location such as Zhongguancun Changping Science Park which developed
extremely slowly.
Someone may debate that this will introduce new population that ever more burden mass
transit and traffic on roads. However, with these adjacent employment base, commuting
demand will decrease. Moreover, with the influence of big enterprises, local government
will pay more attention to impprove the traffic condition.
b) Replies Summary: Views: 2644; Replies: 34;
+1-: 8/2
Most popular opinion and amount:
Positive: reduce the separation of work and residence./ effectively use public
transportation and amenity resources, boost local business. 8; Negative:make no sense.
4.
Build Huilongguan-Tiantongyuan national community integrated demonstrate
zone
a)
Summary of post 2010/07/27
What if Huilongguan develop some office buildings and technology campus? They
people can choose their job location close to their home, which will ease the traffic
pressure. And everyone will be happy with the convenient employment location.
With the special loacation and human resources, Changping District Government should
consider develop new science and technology parks, instead of building such parks in
remote location such as Zhongguancun Changping Science Park which developed
extremely slowly.
87
Someone may debate that this will introduce new population that ever more burden mass
transit and traffic on roads. However, with these adjacent employment base, commuting
demand will decrease. Moreover, with the influence of big enterprises, local government
will pay more attention to impprove the traffic condition.
b) Replies Summary: Views: 2644; Replies: 34;
/-: 8/2
Most popular opinion and amount:
Positive: reduce the separation of work and residence./ effectively use public
transportation and amenity resources, boost local business. 8; Negative:make no sense.
88
Appendix II
The most popular posts regarding to mass transit
1.
Proposal of optimization of subway line.
a)
Summary of News 2010/07/26
Ultimate optimization of mass transit: Line 13, Line 8, Line Changping and Line 16.
To ease the traffic congestion and to make residents life more convenient, the post bring
forward the following proposal.
o
Line Changping: Add a new stop near existing Huilongguan Station and add a
transfer station with Line 13 in Longze Station.
o
Line 13: do not bifurcate the Line 13.
o
Line 8: overlap its route with Line Changping within the 'Life Science Park' to
'Xierqi' section.
o
Line 16: no possible adjustment to fulfill Huilongguan residents' demand.
b) Replies Summary: Views: 2930; Replies: 67;
-/+: 4/17
Most popular opinion and amount:
o
Positive: strongly supportive. / believing in the proposal's acception by Beijing
Municipal Commission of Urban Planning and proposal's emplimentation. Negative:
4.
o
Some other opinions of the mass transit route.
2.
Beijing Changping Line ' Xi'erqi' subway station will be put into use.
a)
Summary of News.
2010/07/09
89
The Subway Line Changping Line successfully opened its trial operation this morning
(2010/07/09).
Changping line starts north from Tombs scenic, extends south to the Light Rail Line 13
with a transfer station of Xi'erqi Station.
Changping line was constructed in two phases. The first phase links the South Station and
Xi'erqi Station, whose overall length is 21.094 km and contains 7 stations.
Phase I splits the existing Line 13 in Xi'erqi Station into two sections, of which the
western part of Xi'erqi-Xizhimen section of Changping Line is under thorough operation,
while the eastern section of Xi'erqi Station to Dongzhimen station will form a new line
13.
b) Replies Summary: Views: 3496; Replies: 46;
-/+: 19/2.
Most popular opinion and amount:
Negative: the Line 13 will be more crowed. / increase unnecessary transfer. /Strongly
disagree the split of Line 13. 19. Positive: 2.
3.
Enhancing the development of transit bus routes and commuter bus routes
which link the major subway station. 2015/01/19
a)
Summary of News.
Many locales are in a situation of broad roads with no bus routes which make it so
inconvenience for residents to commute. Thereby I propose add one subway station in
Line 8 between Xi'erqi and Longze, which will ease the pressure of Xi'erqi station.
And I propose to open new bus route that link local communities to nearby subway
station, which will facilitate mode share of public transport and low-carbon trips.
Replies Summary: Views: 1042; Replies: 21;
90
-/+: 1/15