Urban Residential Suitability Evaluation of Dalian''s Residents
大连居民的城市宜居性评价

In 1898, Howard put forward "garden city" as an introspection of the expense human paid for cities' vigorous development.One hundred years later, with the acceleration of urbanization China came the same problems.The deterioration of the living environment in cities is more and more common because of the agglomeration of population and industry in metropolitan areas.As a result, many scholars focus on the study of urban residential suitability, including the concept, content, influencing factors, as well as evaluation methods of it.There are usually three ways to appraise living environment, objective, subjective, and a combination of the two.This paper applies subjective method to have an overview of the suitability in Dalian.Choosing security, health, convenience, pleasure and facility as indexes, based on large-scale survey data of the residents' degree of satisfaction with the urban residential suitability in Dalian, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the residential problems in Dalian with the method of mathematical statistics and GIS analysis.The main content consists of the comparison of final score across each index, the study of relationship between attributes and evaluation result, and the comparison of both evaluation and spatial differences across social groups.Four conclusions are drawn as follows.(1) The average score of the five indexes shows that the urban residential suitability in Dalian is at a really fair level.Residents in Dalian are mostly satisfied with the traffic system, physical environment and daily facilities.However, they think there is a deficiency of community establishment.Meanwhile, the security of the city should be improved.(2) The attributes of residents would affect the evaluation result.According to analysis of correlation, the evaluation score is positively correlated to residents' income and education level, while is negatively correlated to family population.Age also counts for part of the final evaluation score.(3) Taking into account of these four attributes, residents in the city can be divided into four groups, which are working class, young white-collars, low-income local residents and young workers.People of different social groups show different evaluations of residential suitability.Working class and young white-collar people, who are wealthy and well-educated, are more satisfied with their living environment.Most of low-income local residents and young workers are living in suburban and old industrial districts, so their evaluation of urban residential suitability is lower.(4) The municipal government is obligated to take into consideration the need of all groups of people when dealing with urban residential suitability.At present, Dalian city has not met the need of the poor.For this reason, the governors should put more efforts on the equity of living environment, especially focus on the area where young workers and low-income residents live, such as Ganjinzi District and Jinzhou Distr