People gain health benefit from well-designed environment both physically and mentally, especially for the older adults who spend most of time in the living environment. Facing the health challenges brought about by aging, age-friendly environment is getting proven to be valuable in many aspects, such as the environmental compensation to the individual activity, the potential effects to older adults’ functional rehabilitation and healthy behavior promotion and so on. Since the built environment and human being’s health belong to two open systems with many influencing factors, the health impact study of built environment, at its emerging stage, still has a series of essential problems to be explored. Among those, the key issue exists in the lack of theoretical basis and applicable research approaches. For this purpose, two theoretical models are drawn on in this paper, which includes the environmental stress model and the active living ecological model. Given the great potential and increasing impact of evidence-based strategy, it is recommended as the major method in health-related studies. In order to improve the correlation between research variables, the paper also introduces an approach of mediation effects analysis.

The number of older people who need help with daily tasks will increase during the next century. Currently preferences and policies aim to help older people to stay in their existing homes, to age in place, even as they become less able to care for themselves and, increasingly, live alone. However, the majority of homes in the US and many other countries are not designed to support advanced old age or are not located to easily provide support and services. The paper explores the needs of older people experiencing frailty. It examines the existing range of innovations to make neighbourhoods and homes more supportive, physically, socially, and in terms of services. These include: enriching neighbourhoods, providing collective services, building all-age neighbourhoods, creating purpose-built supportive housing, developing small-scale intergenerational models, and engaging mobility, delivery, and communications innovations. Some will allow people to remain in their current dwelling but others focus on people remaining in a local community. Few are widely available at present. Urban designers can more fully engage with the multiple challenges of those who have physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments and living in solo households by becoming champions for a more comprehensive set of public realm improvements and linkages.

Planning and developing elderly facilities is being an urgent task for aging China. However, due to the facts such as part of the related key concepts have not been clearly unified, the systematic deployment of facilities is still on the processing way, and the standards are not flexible enough, etc., reaching the target number of beds turns to a priority during the process of development, while ignoring the actual care needs of the elderly. Mismatches between facility-supply and service-demand are shown in communities nationwide. As the first country to enter the super-aging society in the world, Japan has been building a community-based care system since 2006. In the planning of facility deployment, a new type of facility system, with the key feature of community-based and a small-scale is setup independently from the original system. It brings more flexibility to the deployment of facilities by combining the two systems, aiming at building up a close relationship between the elderly and care services in a community. The penetration of facilities in existing communities has been realized by promoting the small scale facility system. Based on official open data of Japan, this study sorts out the deployment and development status of the community-based elderly facilities in Japan, and points out that this planning measure is the key for Japan to achieve the concept of “aging in place”. Based on the experiences, it proposes inspirations such as to improve the facility system, to determine the construction indicators and scale of facilities, as well as to give full play of facility area synergy, which will be useful for China on developing an efficiently care-service system.

In the process of global ageing, unmet care needs of disabled elderly has become a universal problem. For the disabled elderly with severely restricted mobility, spatial factors have an important impact on their satisfaction on the care needs, which has not got full attention in researches worldwide. From the perspective of linkage to spatial resources, this paper analyzes the unmet care needs of community-dwelling disabled elderly and explores the influencing factors. Firstly, it finds that unmet care needs of the disabled elderly are much more than the independent ones. Secondly, influencing factors includes family resources, social resources and space resources, which play important roles in satisfaction on care needs. Effective linkage to spatial resources is the key to reducing unmet needs. Therefore, it suggests creating enabling environment for the construction of future age-friendly community and better planning of care-provider organizations in China. The analysis perspective of linkage to spatial resources in this paper will enhance the traditional theories and enrich Chinese case studies for global ageing issue.

With marine economy increasingly becoming the mainstream of the world economy, the urban agglomeration of the Bay Area develops to be a spatial head region for the development of a country’s urbanization. Based on the spatial relationship theory of modern urban agglomerations, this study used complex network analysis methods to conduct empirical researches on the spatial relationship between the New York Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area, Tokyo Bay Area, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. This study established an evaluation index system, comprehensively studied the spatial relationship of urban agglomerations from the two perspectives of the whole network and node cities, and quantified the spatial relationship of important cross-sea channels. The study found that there is a great difference in the overall pattern and the weight of the spatial relationship between the four Bay Areas. Besides, the construction of the cross-sea channels in the Bay Areas would change the spatial relationship of urban agglomerations significantly. There is a complex relationship with the land-sea space framework of the Bay Area, the spatial distribution of node cities and facilities, and the road grid patterns. The research method of spatial relationship of the Bay Area urban agglomeration proposed in this study is helpful to understand the spatial relationship characteristics and evolution law of the urban agglomeration in the Bay Area and would have scientific reference value for the Bay Area to formulate and optimize spatial development strategies.

The study applied the space syntax method to investigate Manhattan’s urban form evolution and the partial and the overall impact of block combinations, so as to explore the interaction between urban form and urban socio-economic activities. According to the study, the elastic urban form of Manhattan makes it possible for the city to maintain a high accessibility in the process of urban form evolution, as well as its multi-centric and diverse urban form. The spatial morphological characteristics of the combined blocks with different functions indicate that urban form supports social and economic activities. This study has some reference significance for the spatial planning of high-density cities in China.

It is indicated that forms and structures of cities have the properties and characteristics of fractal structures. The complex fractal structure improves the stability of historical space and stimulates the vitality of historical space. Therefore, this paper takes Krakow as the study object, which is a historic city in Poland, to analyze the fractal structure and characteristics of historic space in the ancient city. It includes two research levels. (1) Taking Krakow as the sample to carry on the historical prototype analysis, and analyze the fractal characteristics of the ancient city based on fractal elements and fractal order, to extract the fractal elements and design method which has the superiority in the fractal structure. (2) In order to stimulate the vitality of the old urban area, it takes the revitalization district of Krakow-Kazimierz as an example to make analogy research of the historical prototype from four aspects, such as multilevel superposition, small-scale connection, multi-function mixing and time stack. The rehabilitation of urban historical space based on fractal theory can be used by other historical cities. Especially, it has an important inspiration for city betterment and ecological restoration in China.

The basic planning form of TOD area along urban rail transit line mainly includes straight grid pattern and concentric grid pattern at small block scale. The evolution of these patterns can be reviewed from the history of rail station area planning before TOD era. In 1990s, American TOD concept proposed by Peter Calthorpe still uses such basic urban patterns. In addition, Singapore has developed a super block scale urban pattern in transit station area. These three patterns have great impacts on TOD planning practices in China. As the urban form and block scale focused, this paper interprets the planning pattern evolution of TOD area along urban transit line with case studies at home and abroad, and summarizes 6 main types of urban form, and provides pattern design suggestions for TOD planning. First of all, small block scale is still an important principle in TOD urban design; secondly, straight grid pattern plays a basic functional role; and then, spatial identity in TOD area should be emphasized, and concentric grid pattern is suitable for those important station areas; finally, super block scale urban pattern generally exists in reality, so it needs to be paid attention to, and its problems can be solved.