title: Towards an Applied Urban Form Approach: Temporal Dynamics and Context-Dependent Effects of Urban Form on Air Quality in China
Creators: name: Fan, Yanting
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2025

description: Over the last several decades, air pollution has posed a tremendous socio-economic challenge to the sustainable development of cities. Many studies suggest that managing urban forms, including spatial composition and configuration of urban landscapes and populations, can sustainably mitigate urban air quality deterioration. Particularly, urban form influences air quality through immediate pathways and time-delayed socio-ecological processes. Understanding the dynamic temporal impacts of urban form on air quality is critical to estimating air quality changes and making policy decisions. Yet, the temporal effects of urban form may be understudied. Moreover, evidence indicates the effects of urban form on air quality vary by urban size, density and other dependent conditions. The relationship between urban form and air quality can be influenced by contextual urban forms, while most research concentrates on the independent effect of a single dimension of urban form. These gaps present challenges in applying the statistical findings of academic studies to urban planning practice, given that real-world cities are dynamic and cannot be characterised by a single dimension of urban form. This research may be the first empirical investigation that attempts to synthesise the scientific results to inform planning practice in consideration of the time-lag effect and the context-dependent effect.

The research contributed to advancing the recent discussions on the applied urban ecology approach that is still not fully developed in bringing the urban ecology theory to the field of urban sustainability with practical considerations. This research selects China as a case study to address the research gaps in a real-life context. In the past 20 years, China has seen rapid urbanisation, leading to air pollution issues and notable variations in air quality and urban form. The study aims to deepen our understanding of the temporal dynamics and context-dependent effects of urban form on air quality, which can contribute to the establishment of applicable guidelines for the urban form approach to mitigate air pollution in Chinese cities.

Specifically, for the temporal dynamics, the results indicated urban forms related to mobility and energy consumption have a more significant immediate effect. Other urban forms concerning infrastructure development and land use changes exert a greater influence on air quality after a period exceeding five years. For the context-dependent effect, the study found that population-related urban forms serve as contextual factors that influence the relationship between other urban forms and air quality. Landscape-related urban forms interact in ways that either reinforce or lessen the positive or negative impacts on air quality. The study categorised sample cities into six clusters, exhibiting distinct urban form typologies and air quality attributes. It is hoped that tailored planning guidelines for each cluster sharing similar urban form and air quality characteristics can assist China’s planning practice in applying the urban form approach to address the air pollution issue.