Urban Residential Land Suitability Analysis Combining Remote Sensing and Social Sensing Data: A Case Study in Beijing, China

With the degradation of the environment and the acceleration of urbanization, urban residential land has been undergoing rapid changes and has attracted great attention worldwide. Meanwhile, the quantitative evaluation of the suitability of urban residential land is essential for a better and more powerful understanding of urban residential land planning and improvement. Most urban land suitability studies rely solely on remote sensing data and GIS data to evaluate natural suitability, and few studies have focused on urban land suitability from a socioeconomic perspective. Consequently, this paper integrates remote sensing data (GaoFen-2 satellite image) and social sensing data (Tencent User Density data, Point-of-interest data and OpenStreetMap data) to establish an evaluation framework for analyzing the suitability of urban residential land in the Haidian District, Beijing, China, in which, ecological comfortability, locational livability and overall suitability were evaluated according to five attributes extracted from urban residential land via the factor analysis method. The evaluation results of this case study show that, compared with the suburban area in the northwest, the urban area tends to have lower ecological comfortability and higher locational livability. The overall suitability increases from southeast to northwest, consistent with the spatial distribution of ecological comfortability. This framework can potentially assist with the sustainable development of residential lands and urban land use planning.