ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Urban Science
Volume 11 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2025.1695161
This article is part of the Research TopicTowards Sustainable Cities and Communities: Comprehensive Evaluation and Optimization Strategies of the Built EnvironmentView all 3 articles
The fine evaluation and optimization strategy of barrier-free public activity systems from the perspective of a county-level city: Xinle, Hebei Province
Provisionally accepted
- 1Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China
- 2Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Eindhoven, Netherlands
- 3Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
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Compared with prefecture-level cities and other large cities, county-level cities in China have significant differences in composition of public service facilities, population size characteristics, and social awareness. Thus, it is necessary to conduct refined research on barrier-free design and evaluation in county-level cities. We used Xinle as an example based on the composition of vulnerable groups and people's spatio-temporal activity data from the perspectives of public service facilities, tactile paving systems, and activity areas to explore the construction approach and current situation of barrier-free public activity systems (PAS). The main vulnerable groups in Xinle those who are the elderly, visually impaired, and mobility-impaired individuals. Among these groups, common needs characteristics can be found in the area of shopping consumption and company and enterprise, non-common characteristics centered around food and beverages, life services, healthcare, and parking lots. Then the spatial distribution of related public service facilities is vital for building barrier-free environments. At the same time, the tactile paving system in Xinle has weak correlation with key facilities and poor construction standards. From this, optimization strategies for a barrier-free PAS is construct in this research and to provide theoretical and technical references for county-level cities to carry out related work.
Keywords: County-level city1, Vulnerable group2, Urban public service facilities3, Activityarea4, Barrier-free environments5
Received: 29 Aug 2025; Accepted: 18 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Zhang, Zhao, Zhang and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sen Zhang, zhangsentj@whut.edu.cn
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