Assessing social sustainability: Accessibility and spatial justice of resource distribution for the elderly in Shanghai

Shanghai, as the most rapidly aging city in China, is facing a serious challenge of the ‘silver tide’ in terms of providing sufficient elderly services like hospitals, leisure facilities, and good living environment. These resources and their accessibility matter the elderly’s quality of later life and happiness. Nevertheless, hindered by the historical and institutional factors, the immigrant elderly compared with the natives are generally more disadvantaged during the resource competition in the sense of having worse accessibility and location. This spatial injustice between the native and immigrant elderly undermines the general well-being of the seniors, and the social sustainability in Shanghai. This issue, however, has hardly been addressed in existing literature. Accordingly, this paper aims to measure the accessibility of and spatial justice between the native and immigrant elderly in Shanghai by accessing and comparing their accessibility level to the basic needs related resources. First, Lindenberg’s theories of needs will be employed as the theoretical basis, with which the index system for the specific social and physical sources is proposed. The 2000 Shanghai economic census provides information of the physical facilities. Second, the spatial differentiation of the two elderly groups in Shanghai central city will be revealed, based on the finest spatial unit of 2000 Shanghai population census. Third, the road-network and location based accessibility analysis will be conducted in five travel modes for instance walking, cycling, bus, metro, and car. The shortest distant measure and potential measure are employed for different types of basic needs respectively. Thereafter, by comparing the spatial concentration of the elderly with their accessibility level, the spatial injustice issue is interpreted between the native and immigrant elderly groups over various travel modes. This paper argues that numerous immigrant elderly still are excluded in the outer fringe of Shanghai central city with poor accessibility level in all travel modes, whereas native elderly are highly concentrated in the core area and enjoy a high level of accessibility and needs satisfaction. However, differentiations within each elderly group, each needs category and travel modes still exist, which provide deeper insights into the elderly’ spatial inequity. In conclusion the consequences of the spatial injustice for planning suggestions will be elaborated upon.