Research in spatial pattern of accessibility to community service facilities and spatial deprivation of low income community in Nanjing

As the basic elements of life space, urban communities and service facilities are the basic places in residents’ daily life. And as the significant symbol of life quality, the accessibility of community service facilities is closely related to the social justice of urban public resource allocation, so it is an important content in urban social geography and urban planning. This paper firstly discusses the different methods of measuring accessibility, and then chooses the minimum distance method to measure the accessibility of community service facilities after comparing them. And then this paper adopts the residential land parcels of present land use map of Nanjing as the basic analytical unit to analyze accessibility, which is creative and different from previous studies. This paper chooses four typical community service facilities as the analytic targets, including education facilities, medical facilities, commercial facilities and parks and green lands. And then this paper analyzes the spatial pattern of accessibility to community service facilities in Nanjing with GIS in two aspects: on the one hand it analyzes the spatial differentiation pattern of various community service facilities accessibility, and on the other hand it researches the spatial differentiation pattern of community service facilities comprehensive accessibility. In order to analyze the influence of community service facilities accessibility on residents’ daily life more deeply, this research investigates related low income communities in urban fringe of Nanjing, and investigates four communities in inner city and new towns as comparative references. The investigation contains residential satisfaction, daily activities, community attachment and residential mobility through the methods of questionnaires and depth interviews. Then this paper analyzes the spatial deprivation of low income groups of urban fringe, and summarizes conceptual model of spatial deprivation of low income community based on low community service facilities accessibility. The results show that: the accessibility to four kinds of community facilities all presents the characteristic of spatial variation, which is high in inner city and low in suburb, and the spatial variation of education and medical facilities is more remarkable; Low community service facilities accessibility not only results in low degree of satisfaction of community service facilities, and leads to their perception of spatial deprivation, but also impedes the formation of community attachment, leads to intense desire of residential mobility, and will intensify the perception of spatial deprivation under their low economic capability. When planning the public housing in the future, the government should pay more attention to the construction of related service facilities so as to achieve social and spatial justice.