| Author: | Yao, Yepeng |
| Title: | Understanding the urban form and public health - a case of Hong Kong |
| Advisors: | Shi, Wenzhong John (LSGI) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Subject: | Urban geography City planning -- China -- Hong Kong Urban health -- China -- Hong Kong Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics |
| Pages: | xii, 144 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The urban form has played an essential role in affecting our daily life, such as human mobilities and activities resulting from the urbanization process. As one of the typical human activities driven and influenced by the city environment, public health emergencies have been thoroughly studied throughout the history of urbanization. The relationship between urban form and pandemics has been part of the history of urbanization since the cholera outbreaks in the middle of the 19th century. Recently with the availability of human-generated spatial big data, various urban studies have gradually shifted from studying the characteristics of human activities in the city to the interactions between human and the city properties such as the physical structure or the city's layout. Current related research has mainly emphasized the following aspects (1) the impact of the disease on daily life; (2) the diffusion pattern of the disease on multiple administrative levels; and (3) the control measures for mitigating the transmission. However, the role of urban form in driving and shaping public health events has not been thoroughly investigated. Furthermore, the common geographic representation methods of these studies are always limited to the conventional geographic representation methods such as administrative boundary. These conventional geographic representations largely remain at the descriptive level and thus fail to provide deep insights into increasing urban uncertainties caused by complex urban forms and complicated urban processes. The urban form refers to the distribution of urban space and activities in urban settings. Specifically, it is about how the city's spatial structure shapes human activities or how the underlying driven force from the arrangement of urban space affects human activities. Previous research which explores infectious disease and urban form has already implied this mechanism's existence in their domain, such as commuting patterns and epidemiological investigation, high onset risk area detection and urban polycentricity. However, as the pandemic diffusion is complex and highly dependent on spatial and temporal dynamics, policy measures, and social norms, a more comprehensive study investigating the interactions between urban form and human activities during public health emergencies is still absent in the literature. To address the aforementioned gap, this dissertation would provide a three-stage framework built upon the urban form theory and topological representation method to the public health study. This thesis will also apply this research framework to an international metropolitan city: Hong Kong. This study explores how urban morphology shapes human activities throughout emergency public health events. The overall research method is conducted in three progressive stages: (1) Stage one initially introduces the urban morphology into the study of urban public health events and bridges spatial heterogeneity in the urban and rural area; (2) Stage two further explores and predicts the people's activities during the epidemic through quantitative urban form indicators; (3) Stage three demonstrates how the underlying spatial structure has shaped human activities, by analysing the urban form from the physical world and the underlying spatial structure from the aggregated geographic data. Based on the proposed research framework, the cumulative COVID-19 pandemic and the urban form of Hong Kong are studied. This research would contribute to health geography studies by the following aspects: 1) this research has investigated the homogeneity of public health events and the urban form situating at topological representation perspective. 2) this research has validated the correlation between infectious disease and urban morphology and quantified the interaction between the urban form and the city residents. 3) this study would put new insights into uncovering the mechanisms of how human activities are shaped by the underlying structure of the urban space. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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