Daily-Life Activity Space of Chinese Citizens--A Case Study of Lanzhou City

<p>The purpose of this paper is to clarify the Chinese citizens' daily-life activity patterns and space, through a case study of Lanzhou City. The present author conducted a travel-diaries survey on Lanzhou citizens during June 1992. Questionnaires were distributed through 'street offices' (街道弁事処) to 300 households mainly composed of working couples. The travel-diaries are of time-use and spatial activity records in one weekday and one holiday. 200 adequate data collected from 100 men and 100 women are analysed for this study. The daily-life activity patterns were formulated by analyses on indexes related to trips by sex and research areas. The time-use data were used for grouping the samples by cluster analysis. The daily-life activity space in each day was examined based on temporal-spatial changes of activities using time-geography approach. The main results obtained are as follows. 1) The citizens' daily-life activity patterns differ completely in weekdays and holidays. In weekdays most of the citizens have outdoor activites for single purpose such as working and recreation, but they make many cycles. The ratio of multi-purpose cycles was only 8 percent of the total. The differences by sex and research areas are not very obvious as that of in Hiroshima's case (Chai, 1993). In holidays, the single-purpose travels for leisure and shopping are main. The characteristics of the citizens' activity patterns are related to the unique DANWEI (単位) organization (Chai, 1991), more travels by bicycle and on foot, and to common two-income families etc. in China. 2) The weekdays' life rhythm has routine activities, such as fixed working hours with no overtime, long lunch breaks and afternoon naps, as well as fewer recreation activities after working hours and more shopping activities before going to home. The holidays' life rhythm is more complex, and is characterized with outdoor leisure and shopping activities before lunch and dinner for men and remarkable house-keeping hours for women. 3) Time-use patterns are classified into six types by a cluster analysis for weekdays and holidays respectively (Table 6). The time-use patterns during weekdays are classified into two types, mainly depending on whether they are employed or not. The employment types consist of W 1, W 2, W 3, W 4 which are classified by the length for working and house-keeping hours. The housewives' two types (W 5 and W 6) are separated by whether they spend their time for outdoor leisure or not. On the other hand, in the time-use patterns during holidays, type H1 which spends 9 hours 30 minutes for recreation is contrast with type W2, which has 7 hours of house-keeping. Excepting type H 6 (holiday worker), the other three types have well-balanced time budgets. It was clarified that the classification based on the time-use pattern is effective to analyse the citizens' daily-life activity patterns and space, especially for weekdays. 4) The weekdays' daily-life activity space of the citizens differs distinctively between the commuters and non-commuters. Most of Lanzhou citizens are non-commuters with close work-home locations, and have their activity space within their working areas and vicinities of their residences. A few commuters with separated work-home locations have their wider activity space to the city core or to the suburbs. 5) In holidays most of the Lanzhou's citizens perform their leisure activities such as exercise, stroll, jogging etc. near their houses within their neighborhoods. This can be named 'natural type' of recreation. 10 percent of the respondents who mainly live in the suburbs go to the core for shopping, visiting restaurant and other recreations, extend their activity space to the core area. 6) Regarding the life space structure of Chinese cities, it can be said that DANWEI is successful to control the citizens' daily-life</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>