Heritage Corridor Routing Method From Historic Urban Landscape and Digital Footprint Perspectives—The Case of Historical Urban Area in Nanjing, China

As a method of the systematic conservation of historical, cultural, and natural landscape resources, heritage corridor integrates contexts of humanism and nature and provides the public with continuous linear spaces for recreation, leisure, and fitness activities. Most traditional studies on heritage corridor route planning focus on the analysis of physical spatial conditions, while ignoring public perception and public participation mechanisms. Based on the concept of Historic Urban Landscape, this research excavates modern landscape resources that are closely connected with traditional heritages and analyzes users’ digital footprints to incorporate public preferences of recreational behaviors into the process of heritage corridor route planning, realizing the combination of physical and social semantic data analyses. Basically, this study consists of three parts: 1) through analysis of digital footprints, select urban traditional heritage sites and landscape resource spots into the process of heritage corridor route planning, and fit the preliminary routes of urban heritage corridors with minimum cumulative resistance model; 2) construct a co-word matrix consisting of users’ movement flows and online textual data in the digital footprints, to complete the route planning upon social semantic data analysis; and 3) superimpose the results of heritage corridor route planning generated by the above two steps, and optimize according to the reality of urban environment. The study realizes an effective integration of urban landscape resources with public recreational behaviors and spatial perception in the process of heritage corridor route planning, offering reference to the overall protection of urban heritages and the systematic improvement of public space.