VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Debates on liveable cities and healthy urban spaces often assume that improving street connectivity is enough to support walking; this study shows that, in hot-arid settings, shade is equally critical. We systematically counted pedestrians on 347 retail and retail-adjacent street segments across Al-Khabib, Al-Fayziyyah and Al-Nahda in Buraydah, Saudi Arabia. These neighbourhoods capture a compact, highly integrated core (Al-Khabib), a planned inner district with medium integration (Al-Fayziyyah), and peripheral sprawl with low integration and higher thermal exposure (Al-Nahda). Each segment was observed in the summer of 2023 in repeated 20-minute sessions (morning, afternoon, and evening; weekdays and weekends) using dashcam-based street recordings. We linked pedestrian counts to local spatial integration (R800) and sky view factor (SVF) and estimated negative binomial models with neighbourhood fixed effects and controls for height-to-width ratio, street orientation, pavement cover ratio, proximity to heat sinks and green plot ratio. Two clear patterns emerge: more accessible streets attract more walking, and streets with lower solar visibility factors (SVF) also attract more walking. To isolate exposure at comparable accessibility, we paired shaded and exposed segments with nearly identical R800 values (nearest-neighbour matching; calliper ±0.03). Shaded segments carried about five more pedestrians per segment than their exposed counterparts. Since R800 is the strongest predictor of walking in this study, we investigated whether SVF influences the accessibility–walking relationship. We find no such moderation: shade and accessibility act additively. The design implication is direct: high-integration retail corridors must also be continuously shaded — through trees, arcades or tensile canopies — if walking is to be sustained under extreme heat.
Keywords: Walkability; local integration, R800; Sky View Factor (SVF); Pedestrian activity; Hot-arid cities.