Deciphering physical disorder of urban street space in China’s rust belt: Identification, perception, and interpretation through street-view images

Physical disorder can cause social disorder and urban decline. The emergence of virtual auditing via online street-view images provides a brand-new way to study physical disorder in the real world. However, most precedent studies focused on cities in developed nations, leaving cities in the developing world largely unstudied. This study aims at addressing this lacuna by taking the City of Qiqihar (Heilongjiang, China) as an example, to decipher its physical disorder status and related factors. By geo-sampling, we extracted 4852 street-view images from Tencent Maps. After training, auditors developed a checklist with 13 disorder items and independently audited the 4852 images to identify disorder items and perceive disorder of each image. We found that the number of disorder items in a street-view image is strongly correlated with the chance of its being perceived as disorder by auditors. In addition, seven out of the 13 disorder items are more strongly associated with the perceived disorder when compared with other disorder items. This study demonstrates that virtual auditing via street-view images is feasible for researching physical disorder and related issues in Chinese cities. It also contributes to the refinement of the traditional "broken windows theory".