Uncovering the balance between the physical and socio-economic environments of cities

Abstract

Evaluating the equilibrium between a city’s physical and socio-economic environments is crucial for creating sustainable and livable urban spaces. While they may appear contradictory, they jointly underpin a comprehensive sustainable urban development (SUD) strategy. Traditional methods usually focus on assessing the balance in development between the physical and socio-economic environment from a specific perspective, such as how neighborhood greenery shapes real estate value. Yet, they fall short of delivering a holistic balance assessment in the development of the physical and socio-economic dimensions. To fill this gap, this study introduces a research framework that measures this balance through house prices. We recognize that house prices are modeled by both socio-economic and physical environments. The framework first constructs a model that utilizes street-level imagery to estimate house prices, capturing the local relationship between physical and socio-economic aspects in one city. Second, by leveraging transfer inference, the trained model is applied to different cities. This process uncovers “transferred bias”, which is the disparity in predictions made by the model in its original city and those made in new cities, highlighting developmental differences in physical and socio-economic environments across cities. The proposed framework offers a new approach to assessing the balance between physical and socio-economic dimensions within urban areas. It enables cross-city comparisons and informs decision-making in urban development, sustainability, and the well-being of urban populations.