Abstract
Mixed land use has become a major principle for creating liveable public spaces and sustainable urban environment. Mixed-use developments with convenient and accessible facilities have been proved beneficial for urban vitality, public health and local economic development. Policy measures like creating accessible amenities and shaping walkable public spaces will not only improve the life quality of human settlements but also generate spillover effects for the local housing market (Song & Knaap, 2004). Throughout the over 30-year rapidly urbanizing era, Chinese cities have suffered from drawbacks of strict land-use zoning, traffic congestions brought by the car-dependent transportation system, decreased urban vitality in public spaces and increasing worries of environmental health. Promoting mixed land-use and creating liveable neighbourhoods has become one of the priorities of Chinese governments. The study area locates at the northeast of Zhengzhou, a rapidly urbanizing megacity in the central district of China and the capital city of Henan Province. The area mixes three categories of sub-regions representing typical phenomena and the highlights of urban China studies: (1) the peri-urban area redeveloped from urban villages; (2) the Zhengdong New City, which is the flagship project of the new city movement in China, and also the urban planning legacy of Kisho Kurokawa, the representative architect of Metabolism; (3) the mixed-use old city centre to be regenerated in the future. The open-access data used in this research include the Points of Interests (POIs) and transaction records of the second-hand apartments in the Zhengzhou central city. Specifically, the geo-tagged POIs data were obtained from the Gaode online map platform, including fundamental information of locations, categories and names. The housing data contains 25789 records ranging from 2017 to 2020, with transactional details such as names and locations of communities, average prices, structural characteristics and completion dates. Based on the review of existing literature on mixed-use, housing price and urban health, this paper investigates the level of mixed land use with the Shannon-Wiener Index (Long & Liu, 2013), which has been widely used for measuring the liveability of built environment and diversity of public amenities. The Ordinary Kriging Method is used for visualization and analysis of the mixed-use index in the whole area, and for comparison among different sub-regions. Furthermore, the externality effects of mixed-use on housing prices are investigated with the hedonic pricing model, which includes logarithmic housing prices as dependent variables, and locational, neighbourhood and structural characteristics as independent variables. In order to mitigate the autocorrelation of housing values, the Spatial Lag Model (SLM) and Spatial Error Model (SEM) are also used for regression analysis. The computing-based research is conducted with the aforementioned open access macro-data, GIS-based geospatial analysis, and statistical analysis with Python, SPSS and GeoDa. The preliminary results indicate that the old city centre is the highest mixed-use region while the new district is the lowest one. The mixed-use level has a statistically significant positive effect on housing prices, which means housing prices increase when located in neighbourhoods with diversified amenities and functions, and the impact shows slight distinctions among sub-regions. As for implications on urban planning, although Zhengzhou has made efforts in providing public amenities, it still requires future endeavour to promote mixed-use developments in the new district and peri-urban area, in order to build a healthier and more inclusive urban environment.
