A Comparative Study on the Preferences of Residents and Tourists in Urban Underground Street Planning

Abstract

In urban planning and design, more and more scholars tend to adopt modern sociological research methods to study public opinions and suggestions on urban planning and design. Underground street is an important urban recreation resource. Visitor preference has a very important reference value for measuring the planning effect of underground street because there is no direct interest relationship between visitors and underground street developers or planners. Visitor preference can become a standard to test planner's works, especially for unsuccessful developed underground street. In the current underground street research, no literature has been found to study the visitor preferences. Therefore, this paper takes Diyi Underground Street, an unsuccessful underground street in Chengdu City, China, as an example, adopts the method of questionnaire survey and designs a special scale to investigate two groups of underground street visitors: residents and tourists. It intends to compare and analyze tourists and residents’ preferences by using SPSS software, and to explore the key points of underground street planning and transformation in the future. The research divides the questionnaire items into six dimensions: environment, decoration, commercial form, public facilities, traffic and other. The results show that there are not only similarities but also significant differences between residents and tourists in the above six dimensions. Similarity concentrates on the issues of common concern of the two groups, while difference reflects their different recreational needs. Therefore, the planning and design of underground streets in the future should first meet the common needs of residents and tourists, and then, according to the market positioning of underground streets and facing the differences in the number of groups, planning and transformation of key projects should be carried out selectively.