A Quantitative Assessment on the Quality of Life in Hangzhou Based on Landsat/TM and Socioeconomic Data

By taking streets and towns as basic spatial analysis units, the quality of life (QOL) in Hangzhou is quantitatively evaluated by integrating principal component analysis and geographic information system overlay of ranked data layers. The socioeconomic variables such as population density, basic residential land price and percentage of college graduate are selected from socioeconomic data and the biophysical variables including percentage of built-up area, surface temperature (in oC) and NDVI value are extracted from Landsat/TM data. The results show that NDVI displays a strong negative correlation with percentage of built-up area (correlation coefficient r = -0.83) and surface temperature (correlation coefficient r = -0.63), so they are regarded as two main influencing factors of "green environment" quality. At the same time, there is also obvious negative correlation between NDVI and basic residential land price (correlation coefficient r = -0.66), percentage of college graduate (correlation coefficient r = -0.59) and population density (correlation coefficient r = -0.29). It means that "green environment" is still not the most important factor for high educated and high income families to choose living environment in Hangzhou, on the contrary, they would like to choose densely populated areas with convenient traffic conditions as their residence. Downtown of Hangzhou, that is, Shangcheng district, Xiacheng district and some units of Xihu district still belongs to higher QOL region (the first 20% of the evaluation value) and suburb appears lower QOL.