The Use of Community Greenways: A Case Study on A Linear Greenway Space in High Dense Residential Areas, Guangzhou

The community greenway is a kind of greenway that goes through high-density residential areas in the city and is closely related to residents’ life. However, few scholars focus on how this type of greenways serves the everyday life of the community as an integrated resource. This aspect is important because the everyday life in the public space involves multiple activities. How to coordinate and satisfy these activities relates to the benefits of community greenways. Therefore, this paper takes a representative community greenway in Haizhu District of Guangzhou as an example, to study whether community greenways match the needs of necessary activities, optional activities and social activities. The usage patterns, the evaluation of the current status, the impact on everyday activities, and the importance of different construction factors were surveyed. The applied methods include site observation, questionnaires and interviews. The results show that more than 90% of users are from communities within 1 mile from the community greenway. More than half of the users (55%) are satisfied with the community greenways. Furthermore, the community greenways benefit the everyday activities of residents, such as transportation, recreation, social interaction and also other minor but important everyday activities. However, from the perspective of residents’ requirements for construction factors, the status of service facilities needs to be improved. The characteristics, overall benefits, and construction implications of community greenways are therefore discussed. Community greenways can be important open space for residents and this paper is significant on community greenways meeting the needs of residents’ everyday activities, thus, to provide a better community living environment and to build a better urban open space system.