LAUSR

Urban cultural space (UCS) has been of great social and economic value for sustainable development, and the existing researches about it mainly focus on some specific aspects, such as historical heritage or cultural service facility. However, UCS hasn’t been quantitatively assessed as an independent system with clear definition and comprehensive classification. Thus, we present a quantitative analysis based on the statistic of UCS provision in different categories between 44 sub-districts in Xi’an and find its inequalities. Xi’an urban land use data and population data of sub-district level are introduced in the analysis process with GIS, SPSS and MATLAB. Our results indicate that inequalities of UCS in Xi’an are mainly reflected in three aspects, including categories, geospatial and population. Among the four categories of UCS, historical heritage and cultural park account for higher percentage, while cultural service facility and religious space are lower. The inequalities in geospatial could be estimated from two indicators. The first indicator named cultural space rate ranges from 0 to 66.88%, while the other named distance between residential and cultural space varies from 100.47 m to 2004.75 m. The inequalities in population could be assessed by cultural space per capita and Gini coefficient. The results indicate that per capita ranges from 0 m2 to 214.79 m2. The Gini coefficient of Xi’an is 0.86, which means that the UCS distribution in population is extremely inequitable. Our studies would further the research on UCS and provide constructive suggestions in urban planning and policy formulation to ensure adequate UCS provision and improve its distributional order in Xi’an.