TY - JOUR
T1 - The relationship between urban form and air pollution depends on seasonality and city size
AU - Liu, Yupeng
AU - Wu, Jianguo
AU - Yu, Deyong
AU - Ma, Qun
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2018/6/1
Y1 - 2018/6/1
N2 - Understanding how urban form is related to air pollution is important to urban planning and sustainability, but the urban form-air pollution relationship is currently muddled by inconsistent findings. In this study, we investigated how the compositional and configurational attributes of urban form were related to different air pollution measures (PM2.5, API, and exceedance) in 83 Chinese cities, with explicit consideration of city size and seasonality. Ten landscape metrics were selected to quantify urban form attributes, and Spearman’s correlation was used to quantify the urban form-air pollution relationship. Our results show that the urban form and air pollution relationship was dominated by city size and moderated by seasonality. Specifically, urban air pollution levels increased consistently and substantially from small to medium, large, and megacities. The urban form-air pollution relationship depended greatly on seasonality and monsoons. That is, the relationship was more pronounced in spring and summer than fall and winter, as well as in cities affected by monsoons. Urban air pollution was correlated more strongly with landscape composition metrics than landscape configuration metrics which seemed to affect only PM2.5 concentrations. Our study suggests that, to understand how air pollution levels are related to urban form, city size and seasonality must be explicitly considered (or controlled). Also, in order to mitigate urban air pollution problems, regional urban planning is needed to curb the spatial extent of built-up areas, reduce the degree of urban fragmentation, and increase urban compactness and contiguity, especially for large and megacities.
AB - Understanding how urban form is related to air pollution is important to urban planning and sustainability, but the urban form-air pollution relationship is currently muddled by inconsistent findings. In this study, we investigated how the compositional and configurational attributes of urban form were related to different air pollution measures (PM2.5, API, and exceedance) in 83 Chinese cities, with explicit consideration of city size and seasonality. Ten landscape metrics were selected to quantify urban form attributes, and Spearman’s correlation was used to quantify the urban form-air pollution relationship. Our results show that the urban form and air pollution relationship was dominated by city size and moderated by seasonality. Specifically, urban air pollution levels increased consistently and substantially from small to medium, large, and megacities. The urban form-air pollution relationship depended greatly on seasonality and monsoons. That is, the relationship was more pronounced in spring and summer than fall and winter, as well as in cities affected by monsoons. Urban air pollution was correlated more strongly with landscape composition metrics than landscape configuration metrics which seemed to affect only PM2.5 concentrations. Our study suggests that, to understand how air pollution levels are related to urban form, city size and seasonality must be explicitly considered (or controlled). Also, in order to mitigate urban air pollution problems, regional urban planning is needed to curb the spatial extent of built-up areas, reduce the degree of urban fragmentation, and increase urban compactness and contiguity, especially for large and megacities.
KW - Air Pollution Index
KW - Built-up area
KW - Exceedance
KW - PM
KW - Urban morphology
KW - Urban sprawl
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85044278639&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/s11356-018-1743-6
DO - 10.1007/s11356-018-1743-6
M3 - Article
C2 - 29569205
AN - SCOPUS:85044278639
SN - 0944-1344
VL - 25
SP - 15554
EP - 15567
JO - Environmental Science and Pollution Research
JF - Environmental Science and Pollution Research
IS - 16
ER -